The House at the Edge of the World (28 page)

An arm slipped around my shoulders. It was
Corwin. He kissed my cheek. ‘What are you doing here? And how did you know where I
was?’

He didn’t answer, but handed me a
piece of paper. It was a photo, printed on copier paper, of a section of the map. An
enlarged image, grainy, but clearly distinguishable: a pile of brown leaves, and
protruding from them, the head of an adder, with its muted markings.

When you hear the word ‘adder’
you think: Poor shy endangered creature. It is almost your patriotic duty to love it.
But then I said
viper.
You feel quite different about them. Vipers are viperous
– they are untrustworthy, they betray. The V of brown scales was quite distinct on the
creature’s head, where it poked out from the twigs and dead leaves. Matthew had
painted his son as a snake. He must have felt both things: poor shy vulnerable creature,
who doesn’t want to be found. But he would have thought traitor too.

Me – I felt, mainly, traitor. This man, our
father, who had cheated us, who had tried to cheat nature, who had cost me my mother, my
boyfriend, perhaps my most beloved brother, had cost me perhaps my self – perhaps there
had been another, one who, at eighteen, had been about to launch herself into the world.
I also felt – Leave him. He made his choice. Let him live with it. But, you see, he had
stopped us. Corwin and I were stopped, stuck together. Simply put: It wasn’t
fair.

I said to Corwin, ‘OK. I will do this.
For you. For us.’ I looked
again at the image – there he was, in
Matthew’s map; he had been unable to escape. I went cold at the thought, and said,
‘But then we sell the house.’

‘OK,’ said Corwin. He was
shining, gently vibrating with vindication. ‘You have a deal.’

‘So where is he?’

Corwin had blown up a section of the
Ordnance Survey map. ‘In this section, here. It’s about ten miles
inland.’

‘So close,’ I murmured. ‘I
almost feel sorry for him. I wonder how Matthew found him.’

‘Maybe they were in touch.’

‘No. Matthew would never have done
that to us.’

‘You’re always defending
Matthew,’ said Corwin.

There was nothing on the map but a couple of
lonely farms, patches of woodland, a warren of tiny roads, which would be lost between
high, thick hedgerows.

‘How do we even begin?’

‘We’ll just begin – grid it off
like we did with the map. Walk it a bit at a time. Talk to people. We’ll take our
time.’

The following evening I went and knocked on
Ed’s door. When he opened up and saw me standing there, he winced at my poor taste
in arriving unannounced. But he took command of himself and invited me in.

He said, ‘I wasn’t expecting to
hear from you again.’

‘I told you I would give you an
explanation when I had the chance.’

He twitched with irritation. ‘I feel
that the moment for that has passed, don’t you?’

I handed him the bag I was holding.
‘This is for you,’ I said. ‘It’s a present.’

‘Oh,’ he said, looking inside
the bag. ‘Thank you. What is it?’

‘It’s an aspidistra,’ I
said. ‘They’re ugly plants, but they’re impossible to kill.’

He pulled it out and set
it on the table and looked at its unprepossessing dark, leathery leaves. ‘Is this
supposed to mean something to me?’

‘Not really. It doesn’t
matter.’

Red Post-it notes were stuck all around the
room. They had Chinese characters drawn on them in thick felt-tip pen.

‘Is this for next year? Are you going
to go?’

‘Sort of. Yes,’ he said. Then he
said, ‘Wen?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m seeing someone else
now.’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘Is she
going too?’

‘Yes. In fact, she’s
Chinese.’

‘Well, that’s good,’ I
said. ‘It doesn’t suit you to be single.’

‘Don’t patronize me!’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I
didn’t mean to.’ I pointed to a Post-it note stuck to a chair. ‘How do
you say that?’

‘Are you serious? Is that what you
want to talk about?’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘No,’ I said.
‘You’re right. The moment has passed. I’m just tidying a few things
up.’

So we made a start. On Friday night I took
the train down. I didn’t tell Mum I was going. Corwin was in the kitchen, looking
through old photos, trying to find one of our father. But we weren’t a
photo-taking family, and somehow he had contrived always to be behind the camera, or at
the back of a group of people. Corwin had found one of him and Bob in their climbing
gear from the 1970s. It was a good clear photo of him, but impossibly young. He could
have been anyone.

Corwin had drawn a square mile around where
the viper might be – Matthew’s map had abandoned scale, and he had filled that
empty landscape with outsize hedgerow plants, so we could begin only with a guess. We
were to set off from the north-west corner of Corwin’s square and work across.

We had an early breakfast and drove inland.
The sky was closed. It seemed to be raining liquid slate, which settled and massed in
darkness on the road, trapped by the hedgerows. We parked the car by a gate into a
field, and began to walk. Corwin had scaled up the Ordnance Survey map and marked out
our tangled route with a yellow highlighter. We were in a maze of narrow lanes. We waded
through the gloom and found ourselves at road signs we had already passed. Every so
often the wall of hedge opened into a gate and we had a view of winter fields, the
cattle turned in against the rain, huddled together for warmth. We walked down driveways
into empty farmyards, trespassed around the edges of fields. Corwin carried the photo of
our father in his pocket, but there was no one to show it to.

After six hours of this, relieved only by a
sandwich, we returned to our car and went home. My hands and feet were frozen.

Then we did exactly the
same thing on Sunday.

And in the evening I went back to
London.

During the week Corwin wrote to me. The
email had been sent at three in the morning. I had not stopped to think of him alone at
Thornton – whenever I saw him there he was in movement: waving his long arms, talking
and doing. But now I pictured him sitting, still and silent, in that dark house, bereft
of Matthew, quietly sinking into insanity:

I imagine his conversations. He must say ‘hello’ and
‘goodbye’ and talk about the weather and I keep asking myself what
he has gained by our eradication. Perhaps he has another family? Although
somehow I doubt it. He was so overwhelmed by the one he had already. Until
recently I felt as though we were chasing a ghost. But now I feel as though we
are ghosts chasing him. We are silenced. We don’t exist.

I watched the sun come up over frost-trees this morning. I wish you could have
seen it.

The frost gifted us a weekend of winter-blue
skies, filigreed tree branches, ice-crusted puddles. We extended our search outwards by
half a mile. Neither of us was getting much sleep and our trudge through the lanes took
on a hallucinatory quality, so that when, as it grew dark, we turned into a driveway and
came upon a farmhouse flashing with coloured Christmas lights in the shape of a giant
Santa sleigh, I truly believed, for a moment, that I had conjured it from my own
mind.

What did we think we were looking for?
There was nothing rational about our search, although we tried to give it logic with our
grids and highlighters. On our third weekend of searching we walked around a tiny
village with our father’s photo and enquired at shops, and the people we
approached were curious
and asked friendly questions. Corwin answered
with blithe lies. I hadn’t foreseen this, and it made me feel furtive and sullied.
It seemed as though we were cursed to do this for all time. I sat down on a bench in the
village car park and refused to move and tried to make myself cry. Corwin stood over me.
He was hollow-eyed and pitiless. He was never, ever going to give up.

But Corwin did relent, in as far as he
decided that we should treat ourselves to a couple of nights at the only inn for miles
around, the White Hart, which was one of those places that you normally drive past and
wonder who stops there. The nearest building had a petrol pump outside it that looked as
if it hadn’t been in use since the 1960s. The pub was done up for Christmas with
shiny fringed Merry Xmas banners over the bar and a flashing Christmas tree in the
corner. There were dusty bowls of dried orange and cinnamon in the loos. A fire
languished on a pile of ash.

We let them think we were a married couple.
The room had a four-poster bed with lacy white polyester hangings and a deep window-seat
overlooking the cobbled courtyard in front of the main entrance. We made tea from the
plastic kettle with stale tea-bags and UHT milk. I sat in the window-seat and drank my
tea and watched the slushy rain turn to water on the cobbles. At around six we went down
for dinner. We were the only people in the bar. Corwin ordered vegetarian lasagne and
chips. I wasn’t hungry and nibbled stale bread from a basket delivered by an
unhappy-looking fourteen-year-old.

‘Don’t despair,’ said
Corwin to me, as though the despair was all mine.

A few more people came in. They sat at the
bar and chatted with the landlord and each other. They sat spaced widely apart and
called to each other in loud voices. It was part of the ritual. ‘We should make
some friends,’ said Corwin. ‘They might know something.’ He was
cheering up with beer and festive kitsch.

‘I can’t just talk to
people!’ I said, horrified.

He laughed.
‘Don’t worry. Later. When everyone’s a bit pissed.
I
’ll
make some friends.’

We drank slowly. The fire burned gently. The
landlord came over and threw on a couple more logs. On the other side of the pub,
someone started to tune a guitar. My whole being constricted briefly – a single pulse of
instinct. Corwin and I looked at each other. He turned slowly to the landlord.
‘You have music nights here?’

‘Every Saturday.’

I was overcome with a desire to run away. I
said, ‘I need some air,’ and left the bar. Outside in the courtyard the
slush was turning to snow. A couple of smokers, shifting to keep warm, pulled on their
cigarettes and chatted. I walked to the other end of the pub to peer in through the
window at the musicians. I could make out the guitarist, and another man, holding a
drum. They looked up to greet someone who had just come in – his body moved across my
line of sight. I thought: I might not be able to recognize my father, even if I saw him.
I can’t remember him. How would I even know it’s him?

As I stood there, a figure approached, a
man, in his sixties, carrying a fiddle case. I thought, This could be him, and stared at
him so hard that he looked up through the cold and asked, ‘Are you all right,
love?’ And it wasn’t my father.

I went back into the bar and sat down again.
‘Feeling better?’ asked Corwin.

‘No,’ I said.

The musicians began to play a simple slow
reel. I said, ‘What are we doing? This is pointless. Hopeless. We have nothing. We
don’t know he’s ever been here. We don’t even have a name for
him.’

Corwin said nothing. He said nothing because
I was right and there was nothing to add. I said, ‘It’s funny, you know. I
really hate him now. I always thought of hatred as a hot emotion, but this is very cold
… very heavy. I know now why people talk about hearts turning to stone.’

Corwin leaned forward and
placed his hand flat over my heart. He said, ‘It’s not cold in me. Not at
all.’

I said, ‘You know that vow you wanted
me to make? The one I said I couldn’t … didn’t?’

Corwin’s hand was still on my
heart.

I said, ‘Well, I did make it,
really.’

‘I know you did.’

‘But I was young. I didn’t
understand what it meant.’

‘Neither did I.’

He sat back in his chair. I said, ‘I
think I want to go to bed.’

‘One more round,’ said
Corwin.

‘OK,’ I said. And I was looking
at him and thinking: I must sever myself from you – from your will – or I will be
extinguished, when someone started singing. We immediately recognized the song, because
it was one that Fuck Off Bob used to sing all the time.

Corwin and I were still looking at each
other, but now we were waiting, because we knew that we were on the point of something.
We didn’t move, just listening to that voice, that stranger’s voice,
singing:

‘A sailor’s life is a merry life.

They rob young girls of their hearts’ delight,

Leaving them behind to sigh and mourn,

They never know when they will return.’

It’s a good tune, and I had always
liked it before I started to despise Bob. The singer sang the first verse unaccompanied,
and still we were poised, and then a fiddle started and immediately we recognized the
playing. Corwin’s eyes blackened in triumph and purpose, and I understood that
while I had been looking, not expecting or even wanting to find, Corwin had been
hunting.

He scared me then. He whipped up straight
and alert. He had our father’s scent. I stood up very slowly and walked the long
miles between our table and the bar, putting out my hands to the
shiny mahogany for support and lifting onto my toes to look over the length of the bar
into the room beyond, and there was my father, and of course I did recognize him. He was
exactly as I had last seen him, sitting, playing, swaying. Only he was quite grey now
and he was bald with a close-cut ring of hair and a well-trimmed beard and he wore
glasses and looked more like Matthew, but it was him. And then I felt Corwin standing
behind me, leaning into me, his hands either side of mine gripping the gleaming
mahogany, his chin digging into my shoulder. And we watched, until the barman came over
and asked us what he could get us, and Corwin asked, ‘Do you know who that is,
playing the fiddle?’