The House at the Edge of the World (29 page)

The barman looked over his shoulder and
said, ‘That’s John Greenaway.’

We stayed at the bar, then, and stood and
watched. The shock of his being there was less his being at all, but that it had been so
simple, in the end. How easy it was for him to be dead and hide and be only ten miles
away from all that had been his everything. That he had turned that everything to
nothing, and how few steps he had had to take to do that, and then how few steps we had
had to take to find him. All we had had to do was to look. It was an insult, almost. Or
a test, maybe, I said to Corwin. In which case, we had failed – or, rather, fallen
short.

Corwin said, ‘Remember that birthday
party? Ellen and Alice. Do you remember them? Remember how they always had to have their
parties together, and the year that Alice hid under the table to see if anyone would
notice that she was missing from her own party? And no one did notice.’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘She
never really forgave us.’

‘What if …’ said Corwin,
discussing this man, our father, some stranger, whom we had thought dead for the last
seventeen years, and whom we were now watching, fiddling away contentedly. A sentimental
tune – he had always been a touch sentimental, I had forgotten that about him; he felt
too deeply, saw mermaids where there were none, communed with vegetables. Corwin and I
felt very light in our conjoined soul, a dizzying release of tension – the end of doubt.
We found that we were giggling. It was too absurd to take seriously, all our grieving
and atrophying for this man who had been simulating all along, and who, despite his
musicality, appeared quite, quite ordinary. We drank and watched (the music stopped and
our father withdrew his fiddle from beneath his chin and cocked and straightened his
head on his neck, a gesture that had always meant ‘And
now’ – ‘And now, children, to bed’). The bar had filled up, and the
musicians’ corner, framed as it was by the high Victorian bar, seemed illusory: a
puppet theatre – you could see the mechanics, the figures didn’t move by
themselves, and still you believed in them. That was the magic. The music sank under the
rising voices in the bar. To anchor myself back in the world, I looked around. We were
among people, nothing more. Why would someone put himself through the inconvenience of
being dead simply to end up among people – and, of all people, these people? They wore
roomy zip-up fleeces and well-worn hiking boots. Perhaps they knew John Greenaway.
Perhaps one or several of these women were or had been his lovers. That one, perhaps,
who was in her early fifties, probably, and who had made the effort to dye her hair but
hadn’t got around to touching up the roots. Or that one, younger, my age – old men
did that, didn’t they, made themselves ridiculous over women as young as their own
daughters? That one there with the tattoo on the inside of her wrist, some pagan symbol
that signified something of great pagan significance.

‘What if,’ said Corwin,
‘actually, he just didn’t care whether we found him or not?’

We began to calibrate a scale for our
father’s betrayal, with wanting to be found and rescued at the top (best case). We
argued a little – should not caring whether or not he was found go above or below him
simply not wanting us to find him? Corwin felt it was worse: ‘Indifference is
always worse.’

‘Not always,’ I said. I often
felt indifferent. There was nothing personal in it. You couldn’t possibly go
through life taking a view on everything; feeling, responding, to everything. It would
be exhausting. No one could possibly live like that.

‘You’re wrong,’ said
Corwin. ‘I live like that.’ He glared in the direction of our father, the
fiddle-playing puppet, who gave the illusion of being alive. ‘Or at least,’
he said, ‘I used to.’

‘There you
go,’ I said, ‘that only proves my point. It wore you out.’

Corwin gloomed into his beer glass. I said,
‘I suppose we ought to make some attempt not to get drunk and form a plan.’
It was ten thirty. Soon it would be time. They still called last orders in the
country.

‘I think we should follow him,’
said Corwin. ‘See where he goes. Observe him.’

‘We should wrap up warm,’ I said
wisely. I was finding myself most amusing. I felt slightly hysterical. ‘I’ll
get the coats. You keep an eye on him.’

Back in the bedroom with the thick pink
carpeted bouncy floor and the romantic bed, I realized I was going to vomit and brought
up beer-bile into the toilet bowl. It had one of those plastic things in it, which
release Mediterranean-blue chemicals when you flush. I had forgotten to eat. There were
individually wrapped shortbread biscuits in a bowl on the tea tray. I stuffed them all
into my coat pocket.

The bell rang: ‘Time please, ladies
and gentlemen!’ Outside it was snowing with gentle conviction. We sat in our car
and watched the pub doors. The man, our father, came out with two other musicians. One
of them seemed to offer him a lift, which he declined, and he turned with a wave and
began to walk away. Corwin and I got out of the car and began to follow. His shape moved
against the snowflakes, which fluttered in the dim street lighting. Over his shoulder
was the curve of his fiddle case. Even if he turned he would not be able to recognize
us: two figures, like him, made shapeless by the layers of coats and scarves and
hats.

While we were still on the main road we kept
about twenty yards behind him, close enough to call out. But we didn’t call out.
We hadn’t discussed what we intended to do, but we weren’t
ready for words. We were in a wonder of watching, not yet able to take in what we were
seeing. When he turned off the main road into the sediment of dark between the hedgerows
we held back a bit, sure that the narrow lane would compress our presence, make it felt
to him, and when we too turned, he had disappeared and I felt a moment of furious
despair that we had lost him, but we sank into the dark after him and as our eyes
adjusted we could see in front of us a neat trail of footsteps laid out in the freshly
settled snow and, of course, immediately I started to sing ‘Good King
Wenceslas’ in my head, and so I followed my dead father’s footsteps in the
snow with the tune going round and round and round: La la la la la la
laa
, la
la la la
laa
laa
.

The footsteps turned abruptly at a stile. We
climbed over, and could now make out his shape at the opposite corner of the field – a
negative black space in the swirl of white – and still we followed. Over another stile,
then another, then up a track overarched with trees, and down the other side, until
after about a mile we came to a farmyard and the trail seemed to stop, but Corwin
pointed and I could see the footsteps resume beyond a patch of cow-churned mud, and we
skirted the farm buildings and I thought: This is it, this is where he has settled. But
there was further to go, into the woods, and there were no more footsteps, because these
were fir trees and the snow had not penetrated the canopy, but Corwin took my hand and
we felt out the path with our feet and eventually we came down out of the wood and into
a clearing by a stream where the snow fell, thickly now, onto a tiny stone hut. There
was light in the window.

We watched the snow fall through the dark
onto the roof of the hut, then Corwin took my hand, and very slowly we approached and
sneaked up to the window to peep in. There were no curtains. There were only two rooms:
a kitchen and a tiny bedroom. We watched our father move around his home. It was lit
with candles. There was nothing decorative, no pictures on the walls. A table, a couple
of cupboards, stacked boxes of
fruit, potatoes and onions, shelves of
preserves. We watched him peel and chop an onion, fry it in a small pan on his range,
crack eggs into the onion, eat the onions and egg piled onto a slice of bread. I
thought: He’s pretending. That’s what he’s been doing for the last
seventeen years, that’s what he abandoned us to do – make believe.

After his meal he washed up in a stone sink
and went to the door. We tiptoed around to the back of the house and crouched by the
woodpile and heard his footsteps go off in the direction of an outhouse, and when he
came back we followed him round and looked through his bedroom window. There was a bed
and four walls of books – dog-eared paperbacks, mainly. We watched him undress. Naked he
looked older, but wiry and muscular under his pale skin. I wondered when he had last
allowed someone to touch him. He put on some thermal leggings and a sweatshirt and
climbed into bed, turned, blew out the flame on his candle.

We turned and walked back to the pub. I
would never have found my way back without Corwin. I had trusted him to do the
navigating, had abdicated it to him. The hysteria had subsided. I felt so tired. I
wanted to lie down there on the snow and go to sleep.

Back at the pub, we let ourselves in
quietly, taking off our boots at the door and carrying them up the stairs. We lay on the
bed on our backs fully clothed under the blankets, staring at the polyester lace and not
speaking, until at last I whispered, ‘I still don’t understand
why
.’ But by then Corwin was asleep.

I must have slept, too, because then it was
light and the room was full of the silence of fresh snowfall. Corwin was awake with his
head propped on his hand, watching me, and when I opened my eyes, he smiled and said,
‘Come on, lazybones.’

I said, ‘Look at you. All
triumphant.’ And it was true. He was iridescent.

‘Not yet,’ he
said. ‘It’s not over yet.’

I still had an ice block where my heart
should have been. I felt nothing, except a desire to know why, so strong that it was
physical. Why? Why? Why?

‘When do we talk to him?’ I
asked.

‘I’m not ready to talk to
him,’ said Corwin. ‘I think we should watch him for a bit first.’ It
was as though we were discussing how to discipline a child. As though ‘watching
him’ was meting out a punishment that would cause our errant father to mend his
ways.

We ate breakfast. I forced down porridge. My
gorge rose with each mouthful. It was Christmas Eve and from the kitchen radio we could
hear a relentless stream of Christmas hits. Corwin fortified himself with sausages and
bacon. His lapses into meat-eating were becoming ever more frequent, as though his anger
called on flesh for nourishment. Then we paid our bill.

In daylight, the walk did not seem nearly so
far. Still, it was well off the beaten track. We would never have found him if he
hadn’t come to the pub. The cows were emerging from the milking shed when we got
to the farm, milling around in the yard, steam rising from their flanks, white into the
winter air. We walked around the farm and into the woods and found ourselves an
observation post among the fir trees. Smoke rose from the chimney of the hut. A pile of
logs was stacked behind the building, almost to the height of the roof. In front was a
row of fruit trees, neatly pruned, the snow sliding from the branches in the morning
sun. Some golden fruit still hung from a crab apple and drew a chatter of birds. A
stream circled the hut and garden so that it looked as if it sat on a tiny island. There
it was, our father’s dream of a smallholding, all laid out in miniature in the
sunshine, sparkling and clean and white, like a fairytale.

We walked around the clearing. There was a
chicken run, a winter garden with fleece-covered brassicas. Tucked back in the trees
well away from the stream was the outhouse. There was
even a couple of
beehives, but no sign of a goat. Then we returned to our look-out position. I sipped
black coffee from a Thermos flask until I felt stretched to the point of snapping.

After a while our father came out to use his
outhouse and feed the chickens and to split a few logs. As we watched, we began to
remember things about him: his love of birds – the way he would pause mid-task and fix
on a tiny bird in a tree, studying its markings, and would not return to his work until
he could name it, pronouncing the name out loud, releasing himself. Through the
binoculars we saw his lips move. The logs were slower to split now. We used to watch
him, the swinging axe,
thud
,
thud
,
thud
, waiting to be old
enough to wield the axe ourselves. We remembered his walk, the set of his shoulders, the
way that one eyebrow was slightly higher than the other so that he seemed to be asking
an eternal question. He fetched a bucket of water from the stream. He appeared to be
quite alone. Treacherous, heartless Rumpelstiltskin, I thought, who parted children from
their parents, in his clearing in the woods, alone and content. But we knew his
name.

It was beautiful, though; truly a most
beautiful morning. I whispered to Corwin, ‘You know that poem “Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening”?’

Corwin shook his head. I murmured into his
ear, as if it were a secret.

‘Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

 

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

 

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.’

I felt very sorry for myself then, because
sleep seemed unattainable; I could not remember what it was to sleep, really sleep,
deeply. I craved oblivion. Corwin said, ‘It’s amazing that you have all that
in your head and you can’t remember fighting with Sandra over marbles.’