The House at the Edge of the World (30 page)

‘It’s a very clever rhyme
scheme,’ I said, ignoring the mention of Sandra. ‘Deceptively
simple.’

We watched a bit more.

‘I see what we’re doing,’
I said, at last.

‘What are we doing?’

‘We’re watching him, and he
doesn’t know.’

Corwin smiled; my lovely malevolent brother.
I said, ‘It’s a sort of power over him, isn’t it? We have knowledge.
We decide when to strike.’

Corwin smiled again. I loved him very much
at that moment, for being so clever after all.

‘So,’ I said. ‘When do we
strike?’

‘Let’s get Christmas over
with.’

It was delicious, this waiting. ‘Merry
Christmas, Dad,’ I whispered, as we turned to go back through the woods.

At Thornton the lichgate and gravestones
were capped with snow. The Atlantic was quiet and black. I could taste it on the air. By
the time I went to bed, the snow was melting. I slept
without dreaming
and on Christmas morning the snow was all gone.

We were invited to Mum and Bob’s for
Christmas lunch. Mum said, ‘Morwenna, darling! You look lovely! You’ve made
an effort! Merry Christmas, darling!’ I had made an effort. I had woken up feeling
clear-headed and vengeful and incandescent with knowledge, and I wanted to look my best
for this, my last day of orphanhood.

The oak banister was wrapped with evergreen
branches and glass baubles. The table was laid with red and gold. There was goose and
honeyed parsnips and spiced cabbage. I said, ‘Thank you, Mum. That was absolutely
wonderful.’ And ‘Great choice of wine, Bob.’ And ‘Oh, is that a
new painting? When did you get it? It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ And things
like that. Mum brought in a flaming Christmas pudding, topped with a holly sprig. Her
eyes flitted back and forth between me and Corwin, but she didn’t say anything
because it was Christmas Day.

After lunch, Corwin and Bob went for a walk
and Mum and I sat on the sofa and watched
Great Expectations
. I said,
‘I’m sorry about your wedding, Mum.’

She said, ‘You’ve already
apologized. One apology is enough.’

I said, ‘But I was only half sorry
then. I’m really sorry now.’

‘OK, darling. There’s no need to
overdo it!’

‘I would like to talk to you about Dad
properly, though. One day. Soon. Before I go back up to London.’

‘OK, darling. But not right
now.’

Later, though, while Corwin and Bob were
washing the dishes, Mum poured me a nightcap. She said, ‘Perhaps we should get it
over with. What do you want to know?’

‘Was he unhappy?’

I expected her to make some flippant
comment, but she thought about it. The red wine swirled in her glass. Eventually
she said, ‘I don’t think your father aspired to
happiness. He thought it was frivolous to pursue it. When Mark compared him to Sir
Galahad at the funeral, I remember I felt an icy hand grip my insides! They were
terrible those Arthurian Knights. Implacable! Your father was like that – austere and
noble. Impossible in a husband. He was so single-minded. He thought that, because he
loved me, I would transform into a farmer’s wife. Me, of all people! So totally
unsuited to nature. As you know, darling, I’ve never aspired to harmony with
nature. I’m perfectly content to be a parasite upon it!’

She pulled back a little, as though
reminding herself to take the question seriously. ‘It’s hard to live with
someone who is always disappointed,’ she said. ‘He hated that job, and he
blamed me – I think he felt that I’d trapped him in it. Perhaps I should have
tried to get a job of my own, but, I don’t know … I’m not sure it would have
made any difference. And we should never have stayed in that lonely, spooky house, with
Matthew always, always, always there. And the weather! Jesus! I just wanted to be safely
back on the London borders where there is no weather.

‘But,’ she said earnestly,
‘there was no affair. There was no thought of an affair. It wasn’t a
loveless marriage. It was just an unsuccessful one. Your father and I were simply a
mismatch. It never occurred to me that it might be possible to do anything about
it.’

We sat in silence for some time. Then I
said, ‘It was the view, probably. It fools everyone. You should have seen Ed when
he came down. You’d have thought someone had slipped him a drug.’

Mum laughed. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I think you’re right. And then I always felt slightly cheated, as if
I’d woken from an enchantment to find myself knee-deep in mud.’

It was time. I was ready.

I counted the church bells throughout the
night until, at four, dazed by insomnia, I went downstairs and sat in the dark in the
kitchen. Soon, Corwin followed. We found that we were talking in hushed voices, as
though we didn’t want to wake our sleeping rage.

It was still dark when we left Thornton, and
dawn was breaking as we parked the car and set off down the lane. At the farmyard, the
cows lumbered towards us and, suddenly, we walked right into him, driving them towards
the milking sheds. He wished us good morning, surprised, perhaps, to see walkers out so
early, but he didn’t see us for who we were under our winter wrappings. He was
treading slowly, like the cows, a familiar path that allowed no margin for the
unexpected.

When we reached the woods we stopped. My
heart was thudding. He had spoken to us. We had heard his voice. I looked at Corwin. He
was shaken and turned to lean against a tree, pressing his forehead into the bark.

At our father’s hut I sat on the
doorstep, listening to the stream, the waking birds, the chickens gently clucking.
Corwin was pacing, bracing himself. All at once he stopped. ‘I can’t do
it!’ he said. ‘You have to do it on your own.’

‘No way,’ I said. ‘Calm
down. We agreed.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I
can’t do it.’ He began again to stride up and down. ‘I feel …’
He looked at me imploringly. ‘I feel … Shit! I think I might harm him. I just want
to kill him. I just want to fucking kill him. And I think I might. I think I
might.’

‘Coward!’ I said. ‘Fuck
off back to the car, then. I’ll meet you there.’

I watched him disappear
into the woods and sat back down. I was surprised to find that, as my anger with Corwin
subsided, I began to feel very peaceful, very patient. I was apprehensive, obviously,
but suffused with a sense of expectancy that gave the morning a pleasant glow. I must
have sat for a couple of hours, because a weak light was coming through the top branches
of the fruit trees by the time I saw him come out of the woods. He saw me sitting there,
and walked towards me with his questioning eyebrows, and still I sat and looked at him.
And then I saw, in his eyes, the quizzical look of half-recognition, then the full
glimmer of understanding, but I didn’t say anything. And he walked right past me,
where I sat, and went into his house and shut the door.

So I waited.

After about ten minutes, the door opened
again. My father said, ‘I’m sorry. Please come in.’

I followed him into the house. He said,
‘Please. Take a seat.’

I sat down. He sat opposite me and laid his
hands on the table. He still takes care of his hands, I thought. And remembered him
carefully washing and creaming them after manual work, ‘So that I can play,’
he once explained.

Still I waited, while he looked at me. He is
searching my face
, I thought. But I won’t let him find anything.

He took a deep breath, and said, ‘You
will have to excuse me. I have lost the habit of speech.’

I waited. I thought: Let him speak. I, too,
can be implacable. I am magnificent in my hatred of him. I am Boudicca in her chariot.
There are knives on my wheels.

Outside, the winter solstice had passed and
there was the kernel of the idea of spring. From where I sat I looked out onto a plum
tree, perfectly centred in the window. This is what he does, I thought. He sits here and
can sense the bud forming in the bark. He watches this tree all year. And then the next
year. It is sufficient for him.

‘How did you find me?’ he said
at last.

‘The
map.’

He nodded – of course, the map.

‘Matthew painted you as a
viper,’ I said.

He nodded again. Then asked, heavily,
carefully, ‘How is Matthew?’

‘Dead,’ I said. I admit to
enjoying that, inflicting pain. I enjoyed my father’s flinch.

‘How did he know?’ I asked.

The question took some time to penetrate his
grief. He was crying, silently, for the death of his father. He drew back on his pain,
forced a voice: ‘I sent him a grid reference.’

‘When?’

‘Not long after …’

He was looking for a word, a name for the
point between Before and After, but there was only one point –
the
point: there
was no need to name it.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why did
you want him to know?’

‘For the map,’ he said. ‘I
thought that he would know and that he would need it for the map.’

‘That’s not good enough,’
I said pleasantly.

He tried again. ‘I thought,’ he
said slowly, ‘that he would know, and that he would think it was his fault. We had
been a little … estranged for a couple of years, and I thought he would understand that
I had settled. That it was all right.’

‘That it was all right?’ I
repeated. ‘Interesting choice of words! Did he ever seek you out?’

‘No. I just sent him the grid
reference. No words. Nothing else.’ An appeal formed on his face. He was about to
express it. I held up my hand to stop him.

‘Once or twice,’ he said,
‘I thought, perhaps, that there was someone watching me. I thought, perhaps, that
Matthew was there. But it was just a feeling. Nothing more.’

The tears dripped off the end of his nose –
for his father. Not for me. I had never seen him cry – almost, that time, when
Matthew sold the land. But he had stopped himself then. Now,
apparently, he allowed himself everything. He wiped his face and said,
‘Where’s Corwin? Was that him and you I passed at the farm?’

I said, ‘What should I call you? I
can’t call you “Dad”.’

‘John,’ he said. ‘My name
is still John.’

‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Well, I shall call you John. Well, John, I think I would like a cup of
tea.’

He looked at me then, as though remembering
something he disliked about me – my tendency to flippancy, perhaps. But I wanted a cup
of tea, and I wanted to watch him, see what he was made of, what held him up.

‘Of course,’ he said, and stood
up and went to the large jug in which he stored water. I thought: Every morning he draws
water and he says to himself,
I am drawing water from my stream
. In the haze of
his memory is the action of turning on a tap with its effluence of chemically altered
water and this act of taking water from the stream is akin to a morning prayer of
thanks. He poured into his kettle the amount of water required for a cup of tea and a
top-up each. This, I thought, is the same about him, the way he measures water into the
kettle. He placed the kettle on the range and we waited for it to boil.

‘I’m surprised,’ I said,
‘that you permit yourself tea.’

‘Some things,’ he said, ‘I
can’t produce myself. I have to work. I help out with the cows. It’s
impossible to do completely without money. There are rates. I can’t risk the
attention of not paying them. I buy oil, flour, tea. I found that I was unable do
without tea.’

I left that sentence to float about the room
with all the things – the people – that he had found himself able to do without.

He took the pot to the kettle and warmed it
and counted out three teaspoons of the precious tea for which he had milked however many
cows at dawn. Pedant! I thought. Fuck you! That is your legacy to us? Your pedantry? The
parsing of tea leaves?

It was pleasant, though,
this slow life – I was prepared to grant him that. I drank his tea without asking if he
allowed himself sugar. I assumed that he didn’t.

‘So this was it,’ I said.
‘Your dream? You just stepped off the world?’

He said, ‘Will you tell me about
Corwin? About your mother?’

‘No,’ I said.
‘You’re dead. The dead don’t ask questions. What happens is that the
living send out soundings, and echoes come back from the Other Side.’

‘I had forgotten,’ he said,
‘your cynicism. Your inability to value anything that can’t be expressed in
a pithy sentence.’

‘And now,’ I said, ‘you
remember! Do ghosts remember? Or are they simply trapped memories? Am I this way because
you remember me like this, over and over again? No,
John
! Don’t answer.
I’m not looking for your opinions. I have a set of questions. I will ask them. You
will answer. And then I will go.’

And this, I thought, is different about him:
he has forgotten how to smile – it is too arduous, this being dead, even if he believes
that he has corrected himself. And despite his care of them, his hands are coarser, the
knuckles beginning to swell. And he has the skin of a peasant, which perhaps is his
secret vanity.

‘Very well,’ he said.
‘Ask.’

‘I’ll tell you this,’ I
said. ‘But only because I want you to know it: these are our questions, mine and
Corwin’s.’

He nodded.

‘The first question is:
how?’

He looked surprised that this was my first
question – the technicalities rather than the emotions. He had to think. Then he said,
‘I had often thought about it. Since childhood. Whether or not it could be done. I
was pretty sure that it could.’

He stopped. It was a lot of speech. He
wasn’t sure that he had the stamina to continue. ‘May I ask you one
question?’ he said.

‘You may,’ I said. ‘But I
may not answer it.’

‘How did you know to look for
me?’

‘That,’ I
said, ‘is a long story. And we don’t have time for it. But,’ I
relented, ‘in a nutshell: John Greenaway.’

He looked relieved then. He said, ‘So
you know.’