The House at the Edge of the World (3 page)

Under the fuchsia Hilda was just visible,
sitting very, very still behind a cascade of red bell flowers. I looked out beyond the
combe to sea. There was no horizon: the morning mist was rising from the water.

‘Actually,’ said Mum,
‘what you smell in those wardrobes probably is shit. All that mouse shit under the
floorboards. Layers and layers of it deposited there over the centuries. The better the
house, the more mouse shit there is – just think how non-U it would be to lift the
boards and actually clean it out! You could probably calibrate the entire British class
system on the depth of mouse shit under the floor.’

Corwin appeared in the
doorway with a glass of orange juice in his hand and smiled at me. Mum sensed the smile
and her eyes snapped open. ‘You two and your secret smiles!’ she said
nastily, and stood up. ‘Do something about those bloody chickens.’ She
pushed past Corwin and went back into the house.

Corwin sat down next to me, stretched out
his long legs and laid an arm along the back of the bench behind me. I made to get up to
deal with the chickens, but Corwin put out a hand and pulled me back. ‘Let them
enjoy the illusion of freedom a bit longer,’ he said. ‘They can’t go
anywhere.’

His leg rested against mine. We shared our
skin. We were tanned and dusted with gold. This dry world was a revelation, a boon: the
pale brittle grass, the hardened soil, the brown crisped leaves. For most of our lives
we had been rained upon. From velvety mizzling rains to wind-propelled water darts. Even
when it wasn’t raining the droplets hung in the air, patient and immobile as the
sheep and cattle that grazed the fields. We had rarely been away from the sound of water
moving. There was always a stream or a river churning close by, winding its way,
building noise, to thunder over the cliff and join the sea. But that summer, the streams
had sunk into the ground. All we could hear were the bees in the lavender.

Corwin was still feeling sorry for the
chickens, and was glaring at the flint garden wall. Suddenly he leaped from the bench
and started chasing them around the lawn. They shot off in different directions,
clucking madly and indignantly. He ran after the leader, bent over with his overlong
arms outstretched. They went twice around the garden before he caught her and, grasping
her firmly between his hands, returned her to the chicken run in the far corner of the
garden. The others reassembled, unsure of their next move now that the pecking order had
been upset. Corwin went along the chicken wire, looking for their escape route, and,
finding a gap under the wire, took a stone and started hammering it back in. I went to
fetch Hilda from the fuchsia. She had laid
two eggs. I tucked her under
my left arm and picked up the eggs. My father always said that the warmth of new eggs
was the most comforting thing he could think of.

I took the eggs as an offering to Mum, who
was sulking in the kitchen, martyred by her yellow rubber gloves. The role of peacemaker
usually fell to Corwin, but she was angry with Corwin of late, we didn’t know why,
something to do with male children fleeing the nest, we assumed. We didn’t assume
that she would miss me when I fled the nest, or that either of us would miss her. Still,
for the equilibrium of the house, it didn’t do to have Mum sighing at the sink. I
felt that I needed to shield Corwin and the chickens from her.

‘Would you like me to boil you an
egg?’ I asked her.

She looked at me over her shoulder with
suspicion, her hands still in the water.

‘They’re fresh,’ I added.
‘Hilda just laid them.’

Mum pulled the plug. There was a loud suck
of draining water. ‘You know, Morwenna,’ she said, turning round, ‘I
really hate it when you try to be nice to me!’

I was about to say something tart when the
food-timer went off, letting out an almighty wake-up trill. We both jumped.
Matthew’s bread had finished proving. My mother’s face twisted and she ran
out into the garden. I yelled, ‘Matthew. Bread-timer!’

Matthew shuffled down the hall from his
study. ‘Oh, thank you, Morwenna,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d put it
in my pocket.’

He took the baking tray from the boiler
cupboard, tipped and removed the damp tea-cloth from the mound of dough.

‘Your mother seems to be crying in the
garden,’ he said. ‘Do you think someone should do something about
it?’

‘No, it’s all right. Just leave
her for a bit. It’ll stop.’

‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘All
right, then.’

It was hard on Matthew. Neither his mother,
his three sisters, nor his wife had ever cried about anything, as far as he had been
able to tell. He slashed a couple of lines on the surface of the
dough
before putting it into the oven. Then, setting his food-timer as he went and putting it
into the pocket of his trousers, he disappeared back down the hall and behind the door
of his study.

I was sliding both eggs into a pan of
simmering water when Oliver appeared in the kitchen.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I
didn’t know you were here.’

‘We’re going climbing,’ he
said, pulling his long hair into a ponytail and tying it with the hairband from around
his wrist. ‘Can I have an egg?’

Oliver always seemed to be there – in our
kitchen – adoring Corwin from afar, which was vexing. Even so, I loved to look at him,
his gentle colouring, the way that he was soft hazelnut brown all over, his hair, his
eyes, his skin, his freckles. And I was fascinated by the way that he looked like a
plain diffident girl from one angle, and how, in profile, his strong nose and
Adam’s apple transformed him into a boy. There was something otherworldly about
this shape-shifting, as though he had the power to vanish, but was too modest to do
so.

I cut up some buttered toast and we dipped
soldiers into our egg yolks, meditatively. Corwin came in with an armful of ropes,
karabiners and harnesses, and I permitted myself a moment of jealousy – it was the one
thing we couldn’t share. Corwin did his best to teach me to climb, but I had –
have still – a terror of heights.

Before I left for work I went to make my
peace with Mum. I found her in the kitchen garden, still wearing the washing-up gloves,
resentfully pulling up carrots. She ignored me for a couple of minutes, so I said,
‘Mum, let’s be friends.’

She stood up and pulled off the gloves, then
swept her right arm around to indicate the garden, palm up, in a movement I recognized
from the ballet lessons I had dropped – to Mum’s disappointment. She had enjoyed
ballet lessons.
She
had possessed grace.

The kitchen garden was beautiful,
monastically calm, divided
into medieval squares. This was what my
father’s soul would look like in image: neatly laid out, not a weed in sight, rot
and canker at bay, a billowy herbal-medicinal softness around the edges and packed with
nutritious goodness. For a moment I saw my mother as she saw herself, banished to the
cloister, and I felt a twinge of sympathy. She had been pretty and plucky and working as
a secretary and had bought her clothes on Carnaby Street until she went on that fateful
camping holiday with her best friend. She didn’t even like camping. And then my
father had lured her in with his strong, silent, country-squire act, and before she knew
it she was pretending to enjoy long walks in the rain and to share his principles.

‘Do you know why your father married
me?’ Mum demanded, moving her feet into third position. She liked to punish me
with sudden hysterical confidences. ‘It was for your grandmother. They all knew
she had cancer. No one told me, of course. That’s why he married me. I was a death
present.’

‘That’s not true,’ I said
helplessly. My father never spoke on the subject, which, of course, made her sound
shrill and irrational even to her own ears. He seemed ennobled by his silence.

‘How would you know?’ she
snapped.

And now, I thought, you will cry. And she
did. But she didn’t abandon herself to her tears: instead they rolled silently
down her cheeks, and her lips pressed together against the strain of her distress. I
picked up the bowl of carrots from the ground by her feet and took them to the kitchen.
Oliver and Corwin were still there, waiting for Mickey to pick them up in the VW van.
Corwin was laughing scornfully at the newspaper, which meant that he was reading about
some disaster in some abandoned part of the world in which thousands of people had died
horrible,
entirely avoidable
deaths because of
Western Greed.

‘Your turn,’ I said.

‘For what?’

‘Mum.’

He put down the newspaper.
‘Where is she, then?’

‘Pulling carrots.’

He topped up his mug of tea, and poured out
another to take to Mum. ‘Anything in particular?’ he asked, as he added the
milk.

‘Dad never loved her.’

‘Poor Mum,’ said Corwin.

‘Poor Dad!’ I said.

That morning the heat had sparked a rush on
Slush Puppies at the Sea View Café and we ran out of electric blue, which upset people.
‘It’s all the same shit,’ I told my customers. ‘They’re
not flavours, they’re just different combinations of chemicals. The virulent green
tastes almost exactly the same and is just as bad for you.’

My boss took me aside and said,
‘Morwenna, you are a bad-tempered, foul-mouthed little smartarse and the only
reason I’m not firing you is that it’s the end of the season
anyway.’

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I
said to my customers, chastened. ‘But we’re out of raspberry.’

The preference for blue began to obsess me.
It bore no resemblance to anything found naturally in food. I spent the day imagining us
all with fluorescent blue intestines, glowing away invisibly. The beach was packed.
Dozens of children ran in and out of the sea. Some of them played together, but many of
them, I noticed, had marked out their own private circuit. I remembered doing that:
pretending to be the only one on the beach. I served ice cream, asking, ‘Large or
small? Soft or scooped?’ and stabbed at Mr Whippys with chocolate Flakes. One
badly sunburned man told me to ‘Smile, love! It may never happen!’ And I
balanced his ice cream on the cone in such a way that it would fall off before he got
back to the beach – a technique I had perfected over the summer.

At four thirty, Oliver came by to pick me up
from work. ‘Where’s Corwin?’ I asked.

‘He’s gone back with Mickey.
He’ll catch up with us later.’

I was resentful to be an errand of
Oliver’s, but we grabbed a
couple of pasties and went to sit on
the sea wall. I told him about the Slush Puppies.

‘Everyone knows it’s not
natural,’ he said, ‘so they go for the most appealing colour.’

‘What’s your favourite Slush
Puppy flavour-colour?’ I asked him.

‘Blue. What’s yours?’

‘Blue.’

The tide was very flat, just lapping gently
onto the sand, no foam on the edge of the water.

‘But why do they call it
raspberry?’ I asked. ‘Why not something bluish, like blueberry or plum or
something?’

Oliver ignored me and wrapped his half-eaten
vegetarian pasty in the greasy white paper bag and lobbed it into a litter bin, alarming
a couple of young seagulls which had perched there. They had not yet mastered the use of
their wings and flapped clumsily to the pavement, bouncing once or twice upon impact.
Oliver sighed and leaned forward to prop his head in his hand. I assumed that it was
Love of one sort or another.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked
dutifully.

‘Don’t you feel sad?’

‘About what?’

‘About leaving.’

Stripy windbreaks and ice-cream wrappers
littered the sand. I looked out over the rainbow of plastic buckets and spades, the
inflatable dolphins, the massed beer guts and blistered breasts, and wondered if I
should be feeling sad.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Why? Do
you?’

‘I’m not sure I want to go to
university. I’m thinking of deferring while I make up my mind.’

I was horrified. For the last two years I
had been dreaming of nothing but the filthy city where I would know no one and no one
would know me. I was going to wear anonymity like a well-cut trench-coat and conduct
life in angular urban grey tones.

‘You can’t be
serious!’

‘Why not?’ His heels kicked
gently against the wall. ‘I’m just not clear why we’re all in such a
huge hurry to leave.’

We both stared hard at the sea. A woman in a
white bikini fell from a windsurfer with a loud scream and a smack of pea-green sail on
the water. The windsurfing instructors kept a count of breasts exposed in the
undignified struggle to get back on the board, and later bragged their tally in the pub.
The woman shrieked with embarrassment as she hooked a leg over the board and tried to
pull herself back on. The instructor gave her a shove, one hand on her left buttock. He
would get extra points for that – they counted hands on buttocks too. She sprawled face
down on the board. I was furious with her for making a fool of the entire sex. She
should have been made to wear a wetsuit. This was the kind of thing I thought about.
Oliver, on the other hand, was busy honing his nostalgia, looking further out to sea,
where the light popped on the horizon, and thinking how beautiful it was.

‘So, what will you do?’

He blushed. ‘I’m not sure I want
to go to university at all. It’s just more endless chatter. Crow is the only one
with the courage of his convictions. He’s going to India to actually do something.
The rest of us – we’re not doing anything. I want to do something practical –
farming maybe, but sustainable farming.’

‘You are joking!’

‘You’re such a snob,
Morwenna!’

‘It has nothing to do with
snobbery,’ I said. He moved his head and shifted from female to male. His
androgyny seemed to preclude a practical career. ‘I just think of you as
…’

‘As what?’

‘I don’t know. I just
can’t see it.’