The House at the Edge of the World (27 page)

Corwin said, ‘I wonder what he calls
himself now.’

I saw myself trapped in a tower with a
chamber full of straw to be spun into gold. ‘Rumpelstiltskin!’ I said.

‘Yes!’ laughed Corwin.
‘That works.’

I imagined the little wizened man, my
father, dancing around the fire, singing out his secret name.

‘I’ll come back at the
weekends,’ I promised. ‘We’ll keep looking.’

Corwin drove me to the station. It was the
season for dead
badgers on the road – the young, setting out on their
own. I worried about leaving Corwin alone with his bitterness.

In London, a pile of mail lay on the table
by the front door. I left it there and climbed the stairs, soothed by the familiarity of
the sound and feel of each loose stair tread. I pushed open the door to my flat. Birgit
was long gone. She had left a note and a couple of bottles of wine on the table. The
flat smelt of neglect, of rain, of mice. Something clinked against my shoe. Ed had
returned his keys. I opened the windows, poured a glass of wine and set mousetraps. In
the early hours I heard a trap spring, unfeasibly loud; and then, half an hour later,
another. I dreamed of mouse corpses, their stiff little tails, their flattened jaws.

Ana’s black eyebrows lifted as I
returned to work. She was pleased to see me back. ‘I’m sorry about your
grandfather,’ she said, and asked, ‘Everything else resolved?’

‘Just about,’ I said. She
didn’t want to know the answer: she was just reminding me that, even if nothing
was resolved, I owed her the pretence that it was.

My hands were out of practice and ached at
night. In the evenings I soaked them in warm water and massaged them with oil. If Corwin
had been there, he would have done it for me – taken my hands one by one in both of his.
Could it be enough – the life he wanted for us? I thought, If there were more words for
love, if there was a word for Corwin and me, for our twin-ness and all that attached to
it, could we make ourselves better understood? If Mum or Ed or Oliver or my father could
have named it and said simply, It is
this
not
that
, would it all have
been defined and obvious? Would they have been spared anxiety about it? Would my father
have stayed? But there was no word for us.

I went through the pile of mail. Most of it
was junk. There was a manuscript I had ordered for a book-design competition. It was
Aesop’s Fables
, printed on beautiful thick ivory paper, into which
the woodcut illustrations sank deep. I smiled. There would have
to be
a crow on the cover. I put it aside to think about later, and picked up a postcard – it
was from Birgit. Her journeying had taken her to a bindery in Italy. She thanked me
again for letting me stay and wrote that I was always welcome to stay with her in Zürich
– the bindery there would be delighted to have me if I ever decided to do some
journeying of my own.

I turned the card over and put it on top of
the manuscript and went to the kitchen to make supper. I was cracking eggs into a bowl,
the butter was foaming in the pan, when I stopped and wiped my hands and went back to
the postcard. The image was from a Roman mural. At its centre a snake writhed within an
eagle’s beak. A sensation that was like heat, but which was fear and triumph and
revelation combined, shot through me. I reached for my phone and dialled Thornton. The
phone rang and rang. Eventually someone picked up. It was a woman’s voice. I said,
‘Who the hell is that?’

‘Hello, Morwenna,’ said Sandra.
‘It’s Sandra.’

‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Have
you moved in or something? Where’s Corwin?’

‘Out.’

In the kitchen the butter was burning.

‘When will he be back?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Well, when he gets back, tell him he
needs to go back to the map. He needs to look for something small – like a mouse or a
vole or something. Maybe even a snake. Something that a hawk might prey on.’

‘OK,’ she said slowly,
appeasing.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘would
you mind taking a message from me? Please. And thank you. And if you leave before he
gets back, could you write it down? He’ll know what I’m talking
about.’

‘Of course, Morwenna,’ said
Sandra. ‘Whatever you say.’

Corwin didn’t call back. And still he
didn’t. And he didn’t answer the phone, and it was only Wednesday and I
couldn’t go back
down until Friday night. I wondered if Sandra
could have been spiteful enough not to leave the message, and then I realized she
couldn’t have been. She wasn’t spiteful. I just wished her to be. I felt
ashamed of myself.

I couldn’t sleep. At last, at three in
the morning, he called. ‘I can’t find anything.’

‘Keep looking,’ I said.

I went back down that weekend. Corwin met me
at the front door. ‘I’ve found something,’ he said. I felt
light-headed, almost nauseous. ‘Not Dad,’ he said quickly. ‘And not on
the map. I’ve found John Greenaway. He was in with the rector.’

It was obvious, really. Matthew had a whole
drawer on John Greenaway’s rector. He had lived a long life and had saved all his
sermons and his correspondence, making copies of his own letters. There were some notes
of Matthew’s – he had toyed with the idea of writing a book about him.

‘Where did Matthew get hold of all
this stuff?’ I asked.

Corwin shrugged his shoulders. ‘Where
did he get hold of
any
of this stuff?’ He handed me a piece of paper. I
tried to read it, but couldn’t make out the handwriting. Corwin took it from me
and read it out to me:

Dear Reverend Wingate,

You say you cannot hear my confession. That you don’t hold with all that
papist nonsense. Although some in the parish would say that your fancy collars
might tell a different tale. Yet I know you to be my friend and will tell you,
shriving or no. I came out of the sea named John Greenaway that day you pulled
me off the beach. Now God and the Devil will sort out who will have me but I
have fathered children in the village and left them without a father’s
name. I want them to know their father’s true name and if they are not
ashamed of it to use it for their own. Lastly I beg that I may be buried with my
true name.

These are my last wishes.

Nathaniel Parvin

That was John Greenaway of Thornton

Corwin handed me something else. ‘This
was clipped to it,’ he said. They were the pages pulled from the sketchbook.
Across two pages was the Devil in various forms, grinning from the rock, as we had
uncovered him, but also scowling, furious, being ridden through the water by a man.

I turned the pages over. On the reverse side
of one was an illustration that took up the whole page. It was the cabin, but not as
described by Ambrose Pearce. It was our cabin, our beach. The tide was out and there was
a thick high-tide mark, which resolved itself into body parts. A man lifted an arm into
a wheelbarrow, but it wasn’t a portrait of John Greenaway. It was a portrait of
Matthew. He had written two words at the centre of the bottom of the page:
The
Sexton
.

My hands were shaking. ‘We’re
getting closer,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Corwin. ‘This
gets us no closer at all.’

The next morning I woke early and went to
look in the graveyard. I found him eventually, his headstone half buried in the ground,
the words almost weathered away by the salt wind:
Nathaniel Parvin, died
1879
.

I went on down to the cabin to spend time
with John Greenaway’s ghost. I had the sense that I had seen the name Nathaniel
Parvin very recently, but I couldn’t think where. It was not until much later,
when Corwin and I were sitting down to eat, that I remembered it. I jumped up from the
table and ran upstairs to my parents’ room and pulled out the box in which I had
looked for letters from Oliver. I tipped it upside-down. There were all the things that
Mum had kept from my primary-school days – pictures, my story-writing books and a folded
piece of paper, which I took back to the kitchen.

I unfolded it on the
kitchen table. ‘Look,’ I said to Corwin. ‘It’s the class family
tree. The one we did with Miss Arden. She made a copy for everyone. You remember – when
Sandra called me Morwenna the Witch.’ There was the name, on the top row:
Nathaniel Parvin. Not John Greenaway himself, but his grandson, probably. I followed the
lines down, to our generation. He had several great-grandchilden. One of them was Sandra
Stowe.

‘That’s how he knew the
story!’ I said. ‘Matthew – that’s how he knew the story. He got it
from the Crab Man.’

But Corwin was right. None of this brought
us any closer to knowing where our father might be. Corwin had now been home for eight
months, living off his savings, and when he hadn’t been caring for Matthew or
obsessing about our father, he had spent his days walking and climbing and working in
the kitchen garden with Sandra. Between them they had restored it to productivity, and
had now turned to reviving the scrubby little orchard. They worked well together,
trading light-hearted jocular insults. Corwin had filled out again. He was becoming
strong and tanned from the work outside. Sometimes Sandra brought her children over.
Corwin had given them their own corner of vegetable patch where they had planted
pumpkins and sweetcorn. They had made a scarecrow – I recognized an old jacket and hat
of Matthew’s.

Now Corwin said, ‘You see – we have a
connection with Sandra.’ I could tell that
he had been thinking.
A dread
chill seized me. I steered him off the subject, whatever it was. He had been thinking
far too much in general.

I bumped into Sandra in the boot room as she
was getting changed out of her work clothes. She always wore jeans and DMs, but now I
stumbled across her in red lacy underwear. She was all sinew except where her four kids
had stretched her belly. There was a rose tattoo on her left hip. She had a
smoker’s face, rippled by the weather; brown eyes, bright with disdain. She
belonged to the house now – whether I wanted her there or not.

‘You and Corwin
will be announcing your engagement next,’ I said childishly.

‘Crow!’ She laughed.
‘He’s too pretty, and he’s got all that going on in his head. I like
my men simple: the sex, food and football kind. You know where you are with them.
And,’ she said, sitting to lace up her boots, ‘they’re easy to
replace.’ She pulled on her leather jacket. ‘Don’t worry, Morwenna.
I’m not going to steal your precious brother.’

But Corwin cornered me. ‘I’ve
been thinking,’ he said, ‘about all this
space
. We don’t need
it all. It’s too much for the two of us. We could split up the house – Sandra and
her mum and kids could rent half of it from us for what they pay for their council
house, and the place would be productive. It would be alive again.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Alive
with sex, food and football men and a giant Sky Sports screen.’

‘You’re such a snob,
Morwenna!’

‘Yes, I am. So what? That’s my
idea of Hell. It’s not happening. And you need to think about what you’re
going to do next. When are you going back to work?’

‘When we’ve found
Dad!’

I said, ‘I’m giving you until
the end of the year. If we haven’t found him by then, we stop this nonsense. I
can’t do this for much longer. I’m exhausted.’

‘You think we can just do that? Just
set a deadline? And then what? We stop wondering? We get on with our lives? Don’t
you see what he’s done, Morwenna? He’s put us in limbo. Disappearance is the
worst bereavement. I’ve seen it so many times: there’s no resolution –
ever.’

And so we came to the crux of the matter:
Corwin and his abstractions. I said, ‘Don’t come over all
I’ve-been-to-Africa with me. Finding him doesn’t help anyone – you
don’t get to do any saving by it.’

Corwin said, ‘He did this to us
deliberately.’

‘No,’ I
shouted. ‘
You
did this to us deliberately. I was perfectly content when
Dad was just dead! And what about Mum? She’s remarried, for Christ’s sake –
you’ve turned her into a bigamist!’

‘She won’t ever need to
know.’

‘I didn’t ever need to know, you
selfish fuck! I’ve had enough of this. I’m going home.’

It was Sunday morning. I didn’t say
goodbye.

I was grateful for autumn, its shielding
dark and thick knits. I didn’t contact Corwin and he didn’t contact me. I
made dutiful calls to Mum, and we told each other nothing – she said, ‘I’ve
resigned myself, darling!’ Although not, apparently, enough to resist exclaiming:
‘God, Morwenna! Sometimes, surely, you must want something to
happen
.’

‘No,’ I said truthfully.
‘I really don’t.’ Because I wanted my father to be dead. My father,
with his slow grace, could never have done to me what Corwin said he had done.

I felt nauseous most of the time. I was
losing weight. I worked on
Aesop’s Fables
. The crows’ skulls that
Corwin had given me hung on the wall above my workbench. I took one and held it between
the fingers of my left hand, away from me, at eye level: this tiny fragile miracle of
nature’s engineering. I let my right hand begin to make sketches. Dead, I thought.
Dead.

I pared the black leather, shaped it,
pressed it into the cover, gave the crow a small dark eyeball and attached ragged
wings.

Vain, stupid Crow who couldn’t keep
his beak shut.

At the end of November there was the
designer binding exhibition. The books were put out for display in glass cases in a
wood-panelled guildhall. Ana came up to me and laughed. ‘Morwenna, you have no
pity! I’ve always felt rather sorry for the crow, myself!’

My book fetched eight hundred pounds. The
buyer wasn’t even in the room. Somewhere there was a library where my book
would end up, to be looked at by … how many people? A handful of
guests glancing over it after dinner? Its owner prising it gently from its slip case:
‘
Look at the workmanship. There aren’t many people left who know how
to do this.
’ Or maybe no one would look at it. It would sit on a shelf in
a row of books that had cost more than my annual salary. The book was just paper and
leather. It was all vanity. That was why Matthew had never bothered to make more than
one painting.