The House at the Edge of the World (31 page)

‘No,’ I said. ‘I
don’t. You have to tell me.’

He closed his eyes – his stern grey eyes
that admitted of no colour other than grey, so that life was always in earnest. It was a
relief to see him blind and not to have to return his gaze. He said: ‘I
hadn’t planned it. I had always wondered about that jump, whether it could be
done, or whether John Greenaway was simply a great romancer. And then there I was,
standing on the edge of the overhang, looking down. It was such a calm tide. I had never
seen a tide like it, a mirror tide. It seemed like an invitation. I had fifty pounds in
my pocket – I can’t remember why. I remember thinking: That will do.’

He opened his eyes. ‘I did think about
my children,’ he said, as though I wasn’t one of them. ‘Yes, I did. I
thought about how they had outgrown me and that that was only natural. And I thought
about my wife. I thought: I can free her. She might stop being so sad. It was such a
waste, her sadness. She wasn’t built for it. I thought about Matthew, of course. I
worried about him.’

I said, ‘Gosh! You’ve been
rehearsing that, haven’t you?’

He looked grey, spent. I allowed him some
recovery time.

‘You didn’t go very far,’
I said. ‘It’s almost insulting – just popping around the corner to buy a
hut!’

‘When my mother knew that she was
dying, she gave me some money. Just for me. It was our secret. By then it was obvious
that your mother and I were … incompatible – that I would never persuade her to share in
my dreams. And I put the money away, in an account. No one knew about it. Not even
Matthew. I thought, When I have my land I’ll use it as seed money.

‘And then, when Matthew sold the land,
I took out the money and closed the account and bought this. For me. My sanctuary. I
bought it in cash, from an old farmer, without a lawyer. My old name is on the deeds.
Then the old farmer died, no one knew me
here, no one knew I had the
land. I just started calling myself John Greenaway.’

‘So you did plan it?’

‘No. I don’t think so. I just
wanted somewhere for me. Somewhere safe. And I used to come here regularly to renovate
the hut, clear the garden. I planted the fruit trees.’

‘So you’ve been here all the
time?’

He nodded.

‘And you’ve never bumped into
anyone who knew you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I limit my
movements. And people are like rats. They move along runs. None of the people I knew
come out here. Their runs don’t extend out into these lanes.’

I laughed. ‘So you never even left
Matthew’s circle. You went to all that trouble simply to come here!
Why?’

‘He sold the land!’

It was the closest I had ever heard him come
to shouting. He composed himself. ‘I begged him not to. After that, there was
nothing left for me. I wasn’t interested in the house – all that stuff. Things and
more things. I don’t know how it happened, but Valerie and I were in different
camps: my wife and her radio and her television, the constant stream of banalities. And
it has only got worse. I see how it has become. People walking along, talking into the
air, like morons. Everyone has quite forgotten how to look about. No one sees anything.
I was absolutely right to take refuge.’

‘But you can’t do completely
without people. We saw you playing in the White Hart.’

‘I can’t do completely without
music.’

‘So,’ I said, after a while.
‘You despised your wife. You thought your children were in an incestuous
relationship. Your father wouldn’t give you your perfect fifteen acres, so you
jumped off a cliff. You didn’t think, for example, that divorce might be a less
drastic option?’

‘Stop! Please. Stop.’

I stopped.

‘What did you
think,’ I asked finally, ‘you were doing?’

‘I didn’t plan it,’ he
said pleadingly. ‘I just jumped, and then I thought, I could have some peace. I
just wanted some peace. I thought we could all have some peace. Divorce – it’s so
messy. People are so messy.’

‘What? You think you didn’t
leave a mess?’ I was incredulous now. It mitigated my rage, my disgust.

He rallied, straightened up, said, ‘I
thought – I still think – that grief is better than slow, torturous alienation between
people who have loved each other.’

I was stunned by the neatness of his
self-exoneration. Corwin was right – he hadn’t faked his own death, he had faked
ours. I wanted, for a heartbeat, to scream this into his face, but I stopped myself. He
should have nothing from us – not our thoughts, not even our anger.

I said, ‘You haven’t used my
name since I arrived. Say it. You gave it to me.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ he said.
‘That was your mother’s idea. She was over-compensating for not being local.
She wanted you to have West Country names. Matthew explained to her that it would be
false to give you Cornish names. You can imagine. That absolutely set her mind in
opposition. I wanted to call you Anne, after my mother, and Corwin, James, after my
grandfather. Those are real names.’

I was glad of this note of bitterness. It
allowed me to leave.

‘You never got a goat,’ I said,
standing. ‘You always wanted a goat.’

‘I had one for a while,’ he
said, taking my question seriously. ‘But they are unruly animals. It kept chewing
everything.’

He had no sense of humour, I realized. I
wondered if he had ever had one. ‘One last question,’ I said. He looked up
at me and nodded. ‘Did you see the Devil in the water?’

He had to think about this. Then he said,
‘I didn’t
see
him, but I met him there.’

‘I’m going
now,’ I said. ‘You won’t see me again.’

‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Goodbye.’

He didn’t stand to see me out.

I had been there a long time for so few
words. The sun had moved above the hut. I left the man who once, seventeen years before,
had been my father, but who had not been since then. I felt nothing for the person
sitting in the hut.

Corwin was waiting in the car. I got in.
‘You drive,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell you on the way
home.’

The imaginary falling man picked up his
fiddle and stretched out his arms. He laughed and tipped himself forward into the air.
He hadn’t planned to jump. Simply, he found himself standing there on the edge of
the overhang, looking down onto the bowl of water and the sea was calling to him. Bob
was sinking to a sitting position, about to pass out. John had seen him do that many
times before. Once out, he would be out for a while.

John Greenaway had survived it – if he was
to be believed. And he had not known, as John Venton did, that this was a tube, a hollow
– there were no rocks directly beneath – and that on a spring tide, such as this one,
the water was deep and descended to sand. John knew this because he knew every last fold
in the rock on that stretch of coastline.

He might still die, of course. But anyone
might die. It would not be such a bad thing. And he might live, and that would be most
interesting. Then he could decide. He could continue to be John Venton, or he might be a
ghost, move invisibly through the world. Nothing would attach to him. He would be free
to look, to think, and not to speak. What a boon that would be – to shed the weight of
language.

Bob was lying on his back, laughing at the
moon. It was important to lean forward, as the fall would rotate him backwards. John
Venton pushed off the edge.

He felt nothing as he fell, and thought that
this might already be death. They say that a person is killed by the fall itself.
Perhaps he and his body had already parted, which would be a surprise, because he did
not believe in a life separate from the body. The fiddle fell from his hand. Some
instinct told him to straighten out,
and he sent that message to his
body, which, indeed, responded and he fixed his arms to his sides and pushed out his
legs and entered the water feet first. For a moment he was suspended, he was under and
in and of the sea. He put his head back and looked at the moon through the water, broken
into a million silver fragments by his impact on the surface. And then his body began to
rise and as he reached the air a pain in his ribs told him that he still inhabited his
body. He swam back towards the cliff face, where he would be obscured by the overhang.
This was instinctive, he did not think about it in those terms at the time. There he
felt about for a hold – despite the calm of the tide, the sea was buffeting him against
the shards of rock, and for the first time he felt panic. It was not so easy to die,
after all. Not a slow death by abrasion. But the panic came to his aid. He found a
foothold under the water, and a sort of seat where he might perch and wrap his arm
around a rock and wait for the tide to go out. He clung there, and experienced something
like sleep. In his dream he was found and returned home, and self-pity welled up from
his navel like bile and burned his throat. Then he started awake.

The receding tide was showing a patch of
sand below where he sat, a good twenty feet above the base of the cliff. He climbed
carefully down the cliff face. The sun was coming up. When he came to rest on the soft
sand the knees of his jeans were shredded and his fingertips were bleeding. He sat for a
few minutes before pushing himself awkwardly onto his hands and knees, and from there to
a standing position. And then he saw, as though the sea had affirmed his act, that
twenty yards away on the seaweed tide-line lay his fiddle case. The instrument would be
ruined, but, out of habit, he picked it up.

Already the freak stillness of that night
had passed and there were waves on the outgoing water. The spring tide had peeled so far
back that all he had to do was walk along the shining dark sand and make his way
carefully over the rocks. Then he walked across Thornton Mouth, leaving a trail of
footprints on the
rippled surface of the sand, as though he were the
only inhabitant of this shore. He walked on, past the cabin where Corwin and I slept,
and on and up onto the coast path. He kept on walking in his wet clothes but he removed
his shoes and walked barefoot, turning inland, past the cows moving towards the milking
sheds, past the tourists sleeping in their caravans, invisible at last.

Corwin was silent as he drove. I talked and
he listened. When we got back to Thornton he went down to the cabin for a few hours.

When he came back he said, ‘It’s
not enough. How could you sit there and not speak? He should
know
! He should
know what he’s done. What it’s cost us.’

‘There was nothing to say,’ I
said. ‘If there was something you wanted to say, you should have
stayed.’

‘You can’t just
disconnect!’ he shouted. ‘You can’t just stop and turn in on yourself!
We’re all connected. We are all responsible for each other or we are
nothing.’

‘You should have stayed,’ I
said. ‘Then you would realize. He is nothing. He has nothing to do with
us.’

‘I want him to pay, somehow. He stole
seventeen years from us.’

‘It’s not like you to be so
vengeful,’ I said.

‘I went away and stayed away,’
he said, ‘because that was the last thing my father asked of me before he died. To
go away until my relationship with my sister “corrected itself”.’

‘You didn’t tell me that
bit.’

‘Well, I’m telling you now. It
was my father’s dying wish – only he didn’t fucking die. I want him to
suffer.’

‘He is suffering,’ I said.
‘We’ve punctured his dream. He can’t dream it any more.’

When I got up the next day, Corwin was gone
with the car. I went down to the church to sit there quietly and read the memorial
tablets: the novels they contained, the potted tragedies. I thought about my father
reading them, and Matthew: the one with its
litany of dead sons ending
with the extinction of a ‘most antient and respectable family’; the couple
who had married there but ‘died in South Africa where they lie in widely separated
graves’; the soldier ‘who received a wound at Waterloo’; and the one
that warns:

See. See. Spectators, and behold

Whether you’re young or whether old

What you in time must be

For Strength nor Beauty cannot save

Nor wealth protect you from the grave

You shall be dust like me.

I did that because I knew that I was done
with Thornton, now. I would be leaving the circle. I went down to the cabin to say
goodbye to the sea, stopped at the war memorial on the way back and recited the names
out loud. Corwin showed no sign of coming back, so I ordered a taxi to take me to the
station. Two evenings later he phoned. He said, ‘It’s all right. I’ve
thought it through. I have clarity again.’

I didn’t ask him where he had
been.

We sold the house, but without the cabin.
We gave the cabin to Sandra so that she could do it up and rent it out to holidaymakers
– it seemed apt that she should have it. We donated the contents of Matthew’s
study to The Sands Museum and auctioned off everything else, apart from the map, of
course, and the curse spirit – we thought we might need his protection. And we bought a
nice little terraced house in central London not too far from the bindery, so that
Corwin can have somewhere in England to come back to. And I have drawn a circle around
myself, but not too tightly. I will permit myself to leave it now and again. I think I
might go to Zürich. Perhaps I will visit Corwin in Africa. Perhaps I will even go on my
own to Chile. I like the sound of Chile – it is
hard to be too far
from the sea there. I am reading Neruda, just in case.

But I kept thinking about what Corwin said:
that our father should know the cost. I thought, perhaps, he was right. We had let him
off too lightly. So I wrote it down. For John Greenaway. So that he might
know
.

I won’t bind it. I will print it out
on unbleached eco-friendly copier paper and tie it up with jute string, and perhaps –
but only perhaps – I will go at night and leave it on his doorstep, and then, when he is
done with it, or if he does not care to read it, or if, for any reason, he has
disappeared from there, it will compost nicely.