The House at the Edge of the World (26 page)

He stopped. I waited. I was all patience,
all clarity.

‘And when I got to the top of the
cliff …’ Oliver sighed – he wasn’t looking at me: he was looking at the damp
tissue in his hands ‘… I stopped. Because it was such a beautiful morning. I just
stopped to look at the morning. The tide was right out and the sand was shining. And
then I saw him – walking across the cove, across the sand. Just walking. And I
didn’t know then that he was supposed to be dead. I saw him walking straight ahead
and I just thought he was out there, being part of the morning. And later, when I heard,
I realized that I’d been watching him walk away.’

With this vision of my father – walking the
length of the low tide, his feet shredded like Corwin’s had been, perhaps,
bleeding into the salt-glazed sand, walking right past us as we slept in the cabin – I
felt my skin cool into an exquisite transparent fragility; a hoar frost encased me. I
understood now why we had not been able to feel anything when we lost our father. The
thief, Oliver, had stolen our grief. The thief, Oliver, had been crying our tears, and
he was still crying them.

‘What makes you so
sure that it was him?’ I asked – I knew that this was my last question for him.
‘At that distance?’

‘I’d have known him
anywhere,’ said Oliver. ‘And, anyway, I remember thinking how strange it was
that he was carrying his fiddle.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m
going now.’

‘I couldn’t tell anyone,’
he protested. ‘It would have been a betrayal.’

‘It was a betrayal, Oliver. And I bet
you have told someone. I bet you anything you’ve told your Andrew all about it –
all about your strange and painful first love. I bet it lends you quite the air of
romance.’

He started and opened his mouth as if to
deny it, but he couldn’t. As I walked away he called out to my back, ‘I
still look for him all the time.’

Without stopping or turning I called back:
‘You don’t get to keep my father, Oliver. He was never yours to claim – he
was ours, mine and Corwin’s.’

I drove for half an hour, my chest tight
with rage, until I had to pull over to breathe. The river had widened its cut through
the fields. I walked to the bank, stripped down to my underwear, climbed into the
soothing water and put my head under. It was so, so cold. The water flowed over me and I
let it wash away my vengefulness towards Oliver, and towards Andrew, whom I would never
meet, but who had shared in the secret – they had nourished themselves on my
father’s deception. But I was calm. I had forgotten Oliver before. I knew I could
forget him again.

The imaginary falling man now spread out his
arms, as Corwin had done, and leaned towards the moon and stepped purposefully out. But
I didn’t know why.

Corwin wasn’t surprised by
Oliver’s story. He said simply, ‘That makes sense,’ as though it did
make sense, all of it. Except that it didn’t – not to me.

‘Why, though?’

‘I don’t know. I think we must
have cornered him, somehow. He hated that job – he was never meant to sit at a desk. You
should have asked Matthew while you still had the chance.’

‘What about Mum – do you think she
knows? Should we ask her?’

‘What do you think? She’s
totally transparent. Just like somebody else I know. Leave her out of it!’

‘How come she gets left out of it and
Matthew doesn’t?’

‘You know the answer to
that.’

So I whispered into Matthew’s dreams
of dying. ‘Why did John jump off the cliff, Matthew?’ I whispered into his
ear, because I imagined the connections in his brain as a mass of soft filaments
floating on the exhalations of my questions. I hoped for a gentle collision that might
still produce a word. ‘Where did he go?’ I whispered. ‘To take up with
a lover? To unearth pirate treasure? To travel into Fairyland? Do you know where he
is?’

But Matthew only breathed. What was left of
him existed only to service his breathing and the plucking of his hands on the
bed-sheets. I had read about this in novels: the plucking of sheets by the dying. I had
thought of it as something only the Victorians
did, like fainting and
sending children up chimneys. But then the nurses increased the morphine and the
plucking stopped and we were left with the breath, percussive and persistent. And Corwin
and I dozed in the room. Matthew rattled as if his organs had dried and crisped, like
autumn leaves, and were being blown about inside him.

And then, one evening, it stopped. And
Corwin and I both looked up at the interruption to the rhythm of this dream of ours,
which had been Matthew’s dying and in which there had been no time or substance
and which had seemed like an always, as though we had stepped into a parallel life in
which we existed as other versions of ourselves. We looked up, as if a blind had sprung
open and let in the bright sunshine. It was late September; there was sun on the
fields.

We straightened Matthew’s sheets and
arranged his hands and kissed his forehead, and I was about to call for a nurse when
Corwin laid his hand on my arm and said, ‘It can wait.’

I thought we would sit down again and simply
stay and contemplate, but Corwin started rummaging about in the old cupboard in which
Matthew stored his materials. I said, ‘What are you doing? Leave his things
alone!’ But Corwin ignored me. He pulled out a bottle of white spirit and a box of
cotton buds and went over to the map.

I said, ‘Stop it. You can’t do
this now. Now’s not the time. You’re upsetting me.’

But he soaked the cotton in spirit, and
picked up the magnifying-glass with his left hand and began to wipe over the canvas,
over the sea below Brock Tor, saying, ‘I’ve been patient. Now is the
time.’

And Matthew lay dead with the sun from the
west on his face and I held the magnifying-glass while Corwin desecrated the map with
tiny, gentle strokes of soft cotton and the paint lifted, until there, at the base of
the cliff, where it meets the sea, a creature appeared, looking out from a fissure in
the rocks; a
grinning creature, camouflaged in colour to blend in with
the granite of the cliffs. It had horns and a forked tail and leered up at Brock Point –
it was John Greenaway’s Devil.

I asked myself, When did Matthew know?

And I remembered him, on the day of my
father’s death.

‘Where did he fall?’ asked
Matthew. This was his first question.

‘Just below Brock Tor,’ said
Corwin.

After the police had gone, Matthew left
Valerie and Bob facing each other in the living room and went into his study and stood.
There was only this standing and the absence of thought, and both the not moving and the
not thinking drew all of his energy to a balancing point beneath the balls of his feet.
Any loss of focus, and he would tip and injure himself. He had experienced something
similar before, when his wife died, but this was different. When Anne died it was simple
bereavement; his soul was stunned. But this …

An idea squirmed at the edge of his
consciousness – a voracious maggot of an idea trying to bore its way into his brain, and
he must keep it out or he must unbalance. And so he stood, still.

Fifteen minutes passed before he dared a
movement. He took three steps, turned and allowed himself to re-form in order to sit
down in his chair. Not a maggot, he thought. Maggots are for the surface, not the water.
An eel. An eel with its blind vacuuming eel mouth twisting at the flesh to feed its
black electric flicker. And in the time that it took to complete that thought the idea
had perforated the membrane and was in.

At last he fell asleep, sitting in his
chair, and slept for two hours the sleep of a man who was
too old for this
.
After a while he completed the sentence: too old for this
counter-betrayal
. He
should never have sold the land. John had begged him. Matthew had
forced his silent son to speak: made him rehearse his plea. Working in the garden, out
with Matthew on their evening walks, John had painstakingly fitted together the words.
It had taken him ten days, and he had voiced them only the one time: ‘Please,
Father. Let me have that land. Please.’

Matthew had thought only of legacy and, for
Matthew, legacy had always meant the house and the objects within the house and the
stories that attached to the circle around the house and, within the circle, the
triangle: house, church, cabin. The land, the soil of it and what the soil could
achieve, was incidental. He had missed it. He could name every flower and tree, but
still he had missed it. And John had punished him for it –
was
punishing him
for it, perhaps. Or perhaps he was in the water, after all. How desolating, not to know,
not to have proof.

Matthew waited for the house to fall silent.
It was only one day off the full moon, but the rainclouds had come over; he
couldn’t see it. There were footsteps on the stairs. The plumbing shrieked,
briefly. He couldn’t imagine that anyone was sleeping, but no one, thankfully,
could be heard to be weeping.

He pulled his stepladder over to the map and
angled his light and his magnifying-glass towards the chine below Brock Tor. He picked
up his palette and began to overpaint.

At Matthew’s funeral I looked for my
father. I thought, He must intuit it somehow. He’ll come. But it doesn’t
work like that. Matthew had kept our grandmother’s ashes and had requested for his
own to be mixed with hers and dug into the soil around the climbing rose that they had
planted on their wedding day: the rose that on his map wrapped itself around the house
and which had grown year by year, a rose at a time, so that by now the house in the
painting looked as if it were held together by the rose and would disintegrate without
it.

I worried about what would happen when we
sold the house. What if they dug up the rose?

Corwin said, ‘We’re not selling
the house!’

And I said, ‘We can’t afford the
inheritance tax.’

And Corwin said, ‘Yes, we can.
I’ve got it.’

‘What do you mean, you’ve got
it?’

‘I’ve been saving,’ he
said.

For all those years he’d been saving.
I’d had no idea. But, then, what should he have spent his money on?

‘I’m not living here. You
can’t make me!’

Around me, the house, empty of its people,
seemed to come out of hiding and reveal itself to me in its true state. Water seeped in;
I watched it spread. The doors jarred on twisted frames. There were broken slates,
gouges in the plaster. The weft appeared in the carpets.

Corwin said, ‘I can’t make any
decisions until we’ve found Dad.’ As though we needed to save the house for
him. ‘No,’ said Corwin, ‘that’s not it. But don’t you see?
We are stuck now.’

I sulked, and as I sulked
I thought about Ed. It was as if he were my connection to the outside world, so I phoned
him.

‘Morwenna,’ he said. ‘How
are you?’

I said, ‘Matthew’s
dead.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes.’

We were silent for a while, and then he
said, ‘Why are you phoning?’

He made it sound as if there was a right
answer to the question, but I didn’t know what it was. I said, ‘I
don’t know, really. I just thought that I owed you a call.’

‘When will you be back in
London?’

‘Soon, I guess.’

‘Well, why don’t you call me
when you’re back?’

I wanted to explain to him that I had come
into the world with my affections, my love, already parcelled out for me and that I was
doing my best to reapportion them, it, my love, and that, with Matthew gone, surely
there must now be some love released for me to bestow where I wished. But it
wasn’t the moment for that conversation. It must wait.

We carried on looking for our father. It
was all we did, day in, day out, apart from when Mum insisted that we come over and eat
sensibly; she assumed that we were taken up with sorting out the house. She was gentler
than usual – had us bring our laundry, fabric-conditioned and ironed it. She made
chocolate cake. We were grateful for it.

If Matthew had taken so much trouble to
conceal, then there was something to find. We turned away from the map and the
sketchbooks and started to go through the bank of wooden cabinets that contained his
files. Matthew was an archivist – it was not in his nature to discard. Somewhere in his
study, we were convinced, was a clue to our father’s disappearance.

Matthew’s sources hung in hundreds of
drop-files, organized
geographically by parish and, within each
parish, by subject, alphabetically. Thornton alone took up an entire filing cabinet. We
started there and lost ourselves in Matthew’s mind. We began to see the world as
he had seen it – not in the two dimensions of canvas and paper but in multiple
dimensions. In his view of the world there was no chronology: he experienced time
through the finest historical layers, like so many sheets of the sheerest fabric,
floating on the breeze, brushing against each other, lifting and curling at the corners
to reveal other times altogether. In his world truth co-existed with invention,
embellishment might be more truthful than fact, fact might be more magical than myth.
Roses held up houses. Demons guarded names. Now when we walked down to the cabin in the
evenings to bid the sea goodnight on his behalf, the landscape shifted, broke up,
rearranged itself. Matthew had lived within a kaleidoscope. Nothing had looked the same
to him twice.

And then, suddenly, my four months were
over. I wasn’t ready. It was the end of October. At Thornton Mouth the sky was a
violent orange, as if there had been a celestial tantrum. It was still warm in the
evenings. We made a small fire on the beach and pulled in some mackerel for supper. We
cast in silence, the fish so stupid that we caught them with the glint of metal. We
gutted them quickly – they are bloody fish, mackerel; they quickly grow rank. We
returned their heads and entrails to the sea.