The House at the Edge of the World (25 page)

I followed Corwin into the alley and out
into the empty car park, but Oliver had disappeared. Corwin stood in the middle of the
tarmac looking wildly around him. Then he threw his head back and yelled one abrupt,
despairing ‘Fuck!’ into the night sky and sat down.

My lungs were hurting from the effort of
running. I went over to where Corwin sat and stood over him. ‘When was the last
time we saw Oliver?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. All I can
remember is him crying at the funeral.’

‘Memorial service,’ snapped
Corwin. ‘It wasn’t a funeral.’ He stood up and grasped my hand and
started pulling me along behind him.

‘That treacherous little
fuck!’

Corwin dragged me across town to what we
still thought of as Oliver’s house. The cul-de-sac struck me as a vision of pure
loneliness, a ring of identical houses lit by a weak orange light from
the streetlamps, each emitting a blue flicker from behind the curtains of one or two
rooms.

We stole up to the house. There were pots of
red geraniums on the front doorstep. We clicked the gate open gently and prowled around
to the back, but there was light only in the living room. We tried to peer through a
chink in the curtain, but there was nothing to see. We returned to the front door and
Corwin put his hand out to ring the bell. ‘It’s the middle of the
night!’ I whispered, but it was too late. Corwin’s finger pressed the
button.
Ding dong
went the bell. It seemed to reverberate right around the
circle of houses. ‘Ding,’ said Corwin, grimly. ‘Dong.’

For the longest time, nothing happened. Then
we heard a shuffle in the hallway, and a light went on and an old man’s voice,
suspicious, scared, called out: ‘Who is it?’

‘Mr Finch? It’s Corwin Venton.
Sorry to disturb you so late at night.’

There was a pause during which he must have
been looking through the peephole to satisfy himself that it was indeed Corwin. Then the
door opened on the chain and Oliver’s father peered through the crack in the door.
‘What do you want?’

‘Mr Finch, we thought we just saw
Oliver. We thought he might be here, and we’d really like to talk to
him.’

The harsh hall light fell across Mr
Finch’s face. The skin under his eyes was a deep purple, his eyes dark with
bitterness. ‘He’s not here.’

‘Have you seen him
recently?’

‘I told you. He’s not here.
He’s nothing to do with me.’

‘But do you know where he
is?’

The door moved towards us, but he was simply
removing the chain, so that he might open it wider, the better to display his anger.

‘I don’t know where he is. But I
know where he’s going,’ he said. ‘That filthy little sodomite. I told
him where he’s going. I said, “You, boy, are going straight to
Hell!”’

Now that he had us there,
he was glad. There was no one else to tell. He pointed his right hand towards the ground
to show us how forcefully he had dispatched his son into the flames. He was wearing
checked slippers, which made his righteous fury all the more terrifying.

‘When did you tell him that, Mr
Finch?’ Corwin asked calmly.

‘He comes round here,’ said Mr
Finch, ‘to tell me the world has moved on! But I asked him, “And God?”
I asked him. “Does He move on?”’

‘Do you have an address? We really
need to speak to him.’

He gave us a fiery look, which told us that
we were going the same way as Oliver, and shuffled off into the kitchen, then came back
with a piece of paper in his hand. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I have no use for
this!’ And he shut the door. The hall light went off, but the blue continued to
flicker through the crack in the curtains as we walked away.

I wasn’t able to sleep, trying to
remember the last time I had spoken to Oliver. I could never get beyond the morning
after the memorial service. I revisited desultory evenings in the pub during university
term breaks and couldn’t picture him there. I must have written to him. At four in
the morning I got up to trawl through the box of school memorabilia and old letters that
was among the boxes in my parents’ bedroom – there were letters from Willow,
postcards from other sixth-form friends, but only one postcard from Oliver. I recalled a
long-since-forgotten sensation of having been interrupted in a conversation with him.
Now I realized that I had never heard from him again. I can’t explain what
instinct told me – us – that Oliver had something to conceal, but in that shying away
from us he told us and we understood.

We flipped a coin. Best out of three: heads,
you go, tails, I go. Corwin flicked it in the air a third time, caught it, and slapped
it on the back of his left fist, pausing ostentatiously before lifting his right hand.
‘Heads,’ he said. ‘You go!’

He looked disappointed. He
was in need of confrontation. Sandra came into the kitchen to make herself some tea.

‘What are you two up to now,
then?’

‘Assigning things to Fate,’ said
Corwin.

Sandra snorted. ‘Don’t you ever
get tired?’ she asked.

‘Of what?’

‘Of talking like that?’ She was
filling the kettle. ‘Who wants tea?’

‘I think you should go,’ I said
to Corwin. ‘You’re the one who really wants to.’

‘No,’ said Corwin.
‘It’s the right answer. He’ll find it harder to lie to you.’

‘I don’t see why.’

Sandra was laughing. ‘I don’t
even know who you’re talking about, but I can see why!’ She pulled three
mugs from the cupboard. ‘Tea all round, then?’

‘What?’ I said.
‘Why?’

‘There’s something about you
makes people want to smack you in the face with the truth,’ she said simply.
‘Who are you talking about, anyway? Not that it’s any of my business,’
she added, pre-empting me with a smirk.

‘Oliver,’ said Corwin. ‘Do
you remember him? Oliver Finch?’

‘The Fairy?’ She put a mug of
tea in front of me. ‘Don’t you give me that look, Morwenna Venton.
That’s what we called him: the Fairy. You can’t stop kids saying stuff like
that.’

Before she went home that afternoon she came
to find me. ‘Say hello to Oliver for me,’ she said. ‘He was always
nice to me.’

I left at dawn the following day. Oliver had
tucked himself between the moors. I drove along the edge of a river. There was light
rain on flat water. Horses waded through the morning mists. I half expected him to have
fled, but as I pulled into the courtyard of converted farm buildings I found that he was
not hiding, after all, but alert to my arrival, coming to the door of his cottage and
standing there while I switched off the engine.

His long hair was gone – now it was very
short: salt and peppered, the hairline far back on his forehead. He wore small, thick
gold hoops in both ears. As he came towards me the muscle shifted in his arms and under
the fabric of his T-shirt and his jeans. He had exercised the girl out of his body, but
when I got close enough to see his eyes they were still a little too full for his face,
the lashes a little too long and curled, the expression a little too close to hurt.

‘Hello, Morwenna,’ he said. He
kissed each of my cheeks. The cool gold touched my skin. ‘No Crow?’

‘Matthew’s not well.
Corwin’s looking after him.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. I was
just about to take the dog for a walk – do you mind? Come on in while I grab a
jacket.’

Inside, I remembered his sobriety. The room
was fastidiously clean. There was a range, a fridge, a large wooden table and chairs, a
desk under the stairs, a laptop and mouse pad arranged geometrically upon it, and an
empty floor space in front of a statue of Buddha and a candle. There was nothing soft to
compromise his principles. The closest thing he had to a sofa was a large hairy blond
dog.

‘Do you live on your own?’ I
asked.

‘No,’ he
said. ‘I have a partner: Andrew.’

‘How does that go down around
here?’

Oliver laughed – he hadn’t even smiled
until then. ‘Oh, they have some euphemisms for us. I’ve heard “nice
boys” and “our gentlemen”. I don’t know what they call us behind
our backs.’

We walked down to the river – it was still
the flat water of early morning, moving in smooth dark planes. Oliver threw things up
the path for the dog and the dog brought them back. Oliver said, ‘You’re
looking very thin. And tired.’

‘It has been a difficult couple of
months,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry I ran away from
you,’ he said. ‘That was childish. I don’t know why I did
it.’

‘You must have some idea.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘It had been an overwhelming day. Every so often I try to make peace with my
father. It’s always upsetting when I can’t. And I wasn’t expecting to
bump into you two.’

The river ran over furred stones. Trout
shadows moved beneath the surface. The sun had appeared and was burning off the mist and
the morning’s rain. On the other bank was a tangle of red campion.

‘How’s Crow?’ he
asked.

‘He’s got compassion
fatigue,’ I said. ‘It’s turned him into a lunatic.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’
said Oliver, for the second time. ‘What’s he doing now?’

‘Nursing a fixed idea,’ I
said.

It was akin to flirting, this verbal
dancing. There was an electric tingle. I had no doubt that he felt it too.

‘What are you doing, these
days?’

‘Working for the Wildlife
Trust.’

‘That sounds very worthy.’

‘It’s OK. A lot of it seems to
involve sitting in an office at a computer.’

‘I can’t
imagine you in an office,’ I said. ‘Somehow you and strip-lighting
don’t go together.’

‘Most people don’t get to love
their jobs, Morwenna.’

I remembered the sensation of being
permanently admonished by Oliver. He may have avoided us after school, but we had let it
happen because it had been tiring always to be found wanting.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m
lucky, I suppose.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I’m still binding books. Living
in London. Trying to avoid change – only Corwin won’t let me.’

He was fussing over the dog, letting it lick
his face. ‘How do you like London? I don’t think I could bear it.’

I’d had enough of this. I said,
‘Do you know why I’m here, Oliver?’

Oliver’s hands were still buried in
the dog’s deep fur. ‘I have an idea.’

‘Good. Well, let’s stop pissing
about. You see, Corwin thinks that Dad didn’t die when he fell off the cliff. He
thinks you know that.’

There was a pause in which a breeze hit the
water and set off the first ripple of the day. The long grass swayed.

‘Why does he think that?’

‘Gut feeling,’ I said.
‘He’s having a lot of those. I don’t seem to get them myself. I just
channel Corwin.’

‘You always did!’

‘Possibly.’ I shrugged.

Oliver had been talking to the dog. Now he
straightened up and said, to me, ‘I really loved your father.’

‘Yes. I remember you saying that
before.’

‘No!’

The dog jumped to its feet suddenly,
guardedly, attuned to the pitch of misery in Oliver’s single word. Oliver was
undoing – dematerializing in the way that he had done as an adolescent. His eyes were
awash. I felt the wonderful clarity of pitilessness. ‘No?’

‘I mean, I was in
love with your father.’

His confession settled upon me gently, as if
someone had dropped the lightest cashmere shawl on my shoulders.

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ I
said. ‘And I always thought it was Corwin!’

‘Well,’ he looked straight into
my eyes – a flash of defiance beneath the tears, ‘Corwin too. We were all in love
with Corwin. Even you!’

‘Gosh, what a lot of tongues must have
been wagging way back then!’ I said. ‘I’m amazed my ears aren’t
burned to cinders! But we seem to be straying from the point. Let’s get back to my
father.’

‘You and Crow,’ Oliver had
re-formed, was solid again, ‘you were so self-obsessed. You never
saw
anything. Crow was too busy looking off into the distance pursuing some grand idea of
himself as a humanitarian – and you!’ He paused, relaxed his shoulders, relenting,
and said kindly, ‘Well. You were just a bitch.’

I waited.

‘You took your father completely for
granted. He was a wonderful man. A wonderful, wonderful man. The soul just shone out of
him.’ Oliver was crying now, for his long-lost love. He wiped his eyes on the
heels of his palms. ‘I tried to kiss him once.’

My stomach moved in a lurch of pure
revulsion. ‘Did he kiss you back?’

‘No. He rejected me very carefully and
gently.’

‘When was that?’

‘Oh. A long time before that night. I
used to help him in the garden, sometimes. I loved that garden. And he was sitting
there, on the bench, and when I went over I realized he’d been crying. It was just
after your grandfather had sold that land. And … Well. I tried to kiss him.’

‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘You
can’t have been more than sixteen!’

‘Yeah. I suppose,’ he said, as
though I had missed the point. ‘He was amazing. He was so kind about
it.’

Mainly, I felt rage. We
stood in silence for a few minutes but there was a cacophony of rage in my ears. Rage
that Oliver had dared to try to appropriate my father for himself and, worse, that he
took it upon himself to make judgement upon the quality of our love. In the end I
reached into my handbag and pulled out a tissue and handed it to him.

‘Right,’ I said.
‘Let’s move on. The night my father “died”.’ I waved my
fingers in the air in the sarcastic gesture of quotation marks.

He wiped his eyes and blew his nose and
looked at me. He hated me, pure and simple. I wondered if he always had.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I fell
asleep and you and Crow went off to the cabin to do whatever it was that you and Crow
always had to be so private about in that cabin of yours and eventually I woke up
because I was freezing and it was about five thirty and I started to walk
home.’