The House at the Edge of the World (4 page)

The beach was emptying of families and
beginning to fill with damp dogs chasing slimy tennis balls on the wet, rippled sand.
The sea was edging out of the rock pools. Old Arthur came down
the hill
in his blue flannel dressing-gown for his five o’clock swim. We watched him walk
out into the shallow red tide, stringy muscles under slack, mottled skin, the white down
of his hair lifting in the breeze. He waded right out until he reached a depth at which
he could begin his slow, lopsided crawl along the length of the bay. Eventually, Oliver
said, ‘Well, I don’t think I can just stand by while we rape the planet. But
it’s obviously not something I can talk to you about. And, anyway, we should get
going.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I
was. I contemplated life without Oliver in it, and came to the conclusion that I was sad
about it. ‘I will miss
you
when I go,’ I said.

Oliver smiled sadly, put his arms around me
and hugged me. ‘And I’ll miss you too,’ he said.

We both knew that he didn’t really
mean me, but Corwin. I didn’t mind. It was almost the same thing.

Oliver and I made our way up into town and
let ourselves in at Willow’s house. A number of small children, some of whom might
or might not have been Willow’s half-siblings, scattered up the stairs. The sound
of Joni Mitchell drew us into the garden, where Willow’s mother reclined on a
picnic blanket, surrounded by a number of her sometime lovers, the last of her beauty
evaporating mistily from her. None of them reacted to our arrival. The household was so
fluid that we might well be living there, for all they knew.

‘Is Willow around?’ I asked.

‘Oh, hello, Morwenna,’ said her
mother. ‘I think so. I think she’s in the greenhouse.’

One of the lovers waved a joint in our
direction, which we declined. I wished I were the kind of person who knew how to accept
casually offered drugs. I wished, in fact, to be Willow, who was blissfully unencumbered
by a conventional family structure, and whose father might or might not have been a
Beatle, her mother having been a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi groupie at about
the right time. Willow occupied a wonderland of uncertainty in which everything was
possible.

We went up to the end of the narrow scruffy
garden and found Willow in the greenhouse, spraying the cannabis crop. ‘At
last!’ she said, when she saw us. We were not late, but she had little sense of
time. ‘Get me out of here!’

Saturdays were always like this. We
gathered ourselves up, pub by pub, half cider by half cider. We drank the cider because
it was cheap. We found Mickey playing pool in the First and Last, but Corwin had said he
was going to the Beacon. Corwin was not at the Beacon but there we found a crowd of
school-mates so we stopped there for a while. In the meantime we had lost Oliver at the
Ship, but found him again later at the Mason’s Arms where Corwin was reported to
have been seen drinking outside the George. By around nine thirty we were all united
down at the harbour at the Lighter and that was where I last saw my father.

I had forgotten that he would be playing
there, partly because Mum, who ordinarily enjoyed a night out, was smarting in front of
the television at home. If I had remembered, I would probably have avoided the Lighter.
He was sitting in a corner of the lounge with four or five of his friends, playing his
fiddle. Bob Marsden was sitting next to him, holding his ear, and singing in a quavering
voice, some ancient song that is certain, either directly or indirectly, to have been
about the Green Wood.

Bob Marsden, in the role of
‘Dad’s best friend’, required explanation, but Corwin and I had never
been able to find one for him. Since my father’s fortieth birthday party when Bob
‘forgot himself’ (my father’s words at the time) and placed his hands
on my budding breasts, Corwin and I referred to him as ‘Fuck Off Bob’ (my
words at the time), which enraged Mum and saddened my father. There was a permanent
whiff of the locker room about Bob Marsden, a sticky stench of lewd boasts exchanged and
female parts appraised and compared. We assumed that he
enjoyed
spending time with my father because it allowed him to talk about himself uninterrupted,
but whenever we challenged my father as to what he gained from the friendship he would
just say, ‘We’ve known each other a very long time.’

My father saw me at the bar and smiled. He
had three pints lined up in front of him, paid for by appreciative members of his
audience, and I could tell that he was still upset, from the speed at which he was
drinking them. My father was a good musician, but his elegies didn’t chime with
our idea of Britain, which, from our remote white corner, appeared to be populated with
Real People, who fought to keep the mines open and suffered class prejudice and racism
and sang angrily in industrial accents of life in the suburbs of the big cities. Some of
us had even been to a big city and met Real People, some of whom had even been
black.

If Fuck Off Bob hadn’t been there, I
might have gone over and asked my father to stand me a pint. But instead I just waved
and, suddenly irritated by his sprigs of thyme and fair maidens at gates, I thought:
Mum’s right. You live in the past. (Afterwards, that thought took on the force of
something spoken aloud, and I lived with the sensation of having wounded my father with
my last words to him, when, in fact, I had simply thanked him for tea.) And then there
was a plan and we turned to leave, Corwin hooking his arm around my neck. We waved at
our father, and he, mid-fiddle, nodded, with a sad smile, which might simply have been
in response to the passage of music he was playing. My father was a still man. He moved
in the same way that he talked: only the necessary minimum. But when he played music he
danced, which always made him appear as though under enchantment, and that was my last
sight of him as we left the pub: my father seated and swaying, rapt in movement.

Corwin took the lead. We made our way back
into town, stopping at the off-licence for a couple of bottles of Strongbow, and at
Mickey’s bedsit for a bag of Willow’s home-grown, and we ambled the length
of the seafront and up onto the cliff path. The
dark was beginning to
settle in the hollows of the sand-dunes and on the surface of the sea but the sky was
still blue. Three angry weals of red had been scratched into it by the sun. By the time
we had climbed to the cliff-top they had faded away. We walked in single file along the
cliff, and each of us must have glanced down into the blackening bowl beneath Brock Tor
as we began to descend to Thornton Mouth, where night had already wrapped itself around
the cabin and was creeping out from the cliffs to meet the water.

That night we built a fire within a ring of
white- and grey-scribbled boulders, just above the high-tide mark. Once I had imagined
that an ancient language was expressed on the stones that one day I would learn to
decipher. We dragged long pieces of sea-bleached driftwood across the shingle and set
them on end, carefully weaving them into a cone two metres tall. We stood back and found
our work beautiful, seeing there a group of dancers, arms aloft, curves white in the
moon, momentarily entwined, on the point of springing apart.

Then Mickey set it alight. The fire amazed
us with the speed at which it caught, twisting itself around the wooden limbs, shooting
flames twice their height into the sky. I look at eighteen-year-olds now, their unformed
faces, their smooth pebbles of certainty clutched tight in their fists, and I remember
our faces in the firelight, how, for once, the Atlantic was outdone and the fire entered
our senses with the force of an autumn storm and held us in an ecstasy of awe at its
destructive power as, one by one, the branches of driftwood submitted, staggered
inwards, collapsed glowing into the centre.

When the fire was subdued we swam on the
high water. For the last seven years our little group had clung together on our raft of
cleverness, navigating a school in which book-reading was considered posh, and to be
posh was a congenital and incurable affliction. We were, I think, the whole world to
each other. And
yet, that night, as we floated in the moonlight,
shivering on the eerily tame tide as we counted satellites, the ties between us were
lifting. Strand by silken strand, they rose softly from the water.

We warmed ourselves by the fire. Mickey
rolled a joint. I remember the tip of his tongue as he patchworked the Rizlas together,
the way that he passed the joint to Willow. Oliver was pressing his hair dry with a
towel. He let the joint pass him by. He disliked drugs and alcohol: they unleashed words
that could not be retracted, and he was usually the first to leave. But tonight was
special: it was almost all over and he was making allowances.

I lay with my head in Corwin’s lap. He
was preaching. It would be our burden and our duty, he said, our generation, spawn of
Thatcher. We must look to the south and see the damage we wrought there. We must undo,
reduce, redistribute. We must battle with our inflated egos, make ourselves small. For
soon, he said, the south would rise up against us, and its vengeance would be just and
terrible. We were making a hell of the earth, the sun would burn through our atmosphere,
and lo! The waters would rise and engulf us.

‘Christ, Corwin!’ said Willow,
suddenly. ‘Shut the fuck up, will you?’

‘You could start by becoming a
vegetarian!’ said Oliver, quietly but severely.

‘Oh, God!’ I groaned.
‘Here it comes. “How meat is destroying the planet”.’

Oliver ignored me. ‘Meat production is
a really inefficient and wasteful use of land,’ he lectured Corwin. ‘So even
if you enjoy chewing on dead, tortured animals, you should think about the amount of
land in Third World countries that is being given over to your disgusting hamburgers. Do
you know how many square miles of Amazon are chopped down every year for cattle farming?
Do you?’

There was a huge hole in the ozone layer and
the rainforest was in flames.

A gloom was settling on the
group. Willow turned to Corwin. ‘You see what you’ve started? Now he’s
at it!’

‘You forgot the farting cattle,’
said Mickey. ‘All that flatulence introduces warming gases into the
atmosphere.’ After a joint and more than his fair share of cider, he found himself
hilarious and started to giggle.

Oliver said, ‘It’s not the
farting, actually. It’s the belching.’

His earnestness was too comical – we were
all laughing now.

‘I don’t know why you think
it’s so funny. That’s just how they want you, you know. Stoned and amused
and disengaged.’

The accusation of
‘disengagement’ hung dangerously in the air. I deflected it with a catty
swipe of indiscretion. ‘Oliver wants to be a farmer!’ I announced.

Oliver flinched as everyone fell silent and
looked at him. I thought he might at last do his vanishing trick but instead Corwin
pushed me from his lap, leaped up and started waving his long arms around like a fairy
godfather, shouting, ‘And so you should, Oliver. So you should! That’s
exactly where to start. Small-scale farming. Reduce our impact on the
environment.’

Oliver said quietly, ‘Exactly.
It’s like I said to Morwenna. It’s a question of conviction.’

‘Morwenna doesn’t have any
convictions,’ said Corwin, sadly. I thought about raising a protest, but I was
tired, and I knew even then that he was right – all I had was dislike. Then he squatted
behind Oliver and put his arms around him and kissed his cheek. ‘Oliver,’ he
said, ‘you’ve convinced me. I’m going to be a vegetarian from now
on.’

Oliver shot me a look in which agony and
resentment that I had witnessed it were mixed. I felt irritated with Corwin. Really, he
was quite ruthless with his demonstrations of affection. People wanted to mistake them
for love.

Willow and Mickey were arguing about whether
or not it was time to go home. A mile to the north-east our father fell to his
death. You would have thought that we might have felt some jarring of
the soul, but we didn’t.

Willow stood up. ‘We’re
off.’

The light was so strong that we were able to
watch Mickey and Willow cross the beach and disappear into a moonshadow at the foot of
the cliff. Oliver, Corwin and I were left watching the embers. After a while, Oliver
fell asleep under his jacket, his head on his arm, his face covered with his long hair.
‘Should we wake him?’ I asked.

‘No, leave him,’ said Corwin.
‘He’ll wake up when he gets cold.’

We guarded the privacy of the cabin with
superstition, and never invited our friends to sleep there, so we left Oliver by the
fire, crossed the cove to the cabin and took the key from its hiding place under the
eaves, let ourselves in and curled up together under the great-aunts’ crocheted
bedspread and fell asleep to the shingle sighing.

No one noticed that my father was missing. He
had not come home the night before, but it was traditional, after the annual row, for
him to spend the night on Bob Marsden’s really quite comfortable modern
black-leather sofa, before recovering enough speech to apologize – he was always the one
to apologize, with flowers from the garden. And Mum always accepted. And then there was
a truce during which my father tried to be more present and my mother went up to
Barnstaple and bought new shoes.

It was another beautiful day when Corwin and
I woke up. We made tea and walked out to meet the tide, then swam until we were overcome
with hunger and ran back to the house and to Matthew’s bread.

Mum lay on the front lawn, sunbathing. When
the phone rang, at about midday, Corwin and I lay at either end of the hammock, reading.
Neither of us made a move to answer it. At last Mum, as ever incapable of leaving a
phone unanswered, leaped up angrily, tying her sarong around her waist as she went. We
recognized, from her acknowledgement of the caller, a note of sarcasm, which indicated
that she must be speaking to Bob. And then something – not a sound, but a quality of
attention – that caused us to look up and at each other. We rolled out of the hammock (I
remember Corwin holding it steady so that I wouldn’t fall) and crossed the lawn.
There was no hurry. It was as it is in dreams: we were not the agents of our own
movement. In the hall, Mum stood, the old-fashioned Bakelite receiver to her ear, not
speaking. It was dark; the flagstones were cool under my bare feet. Mum seemed to be
glowing red: the henna in her hair,
the tan shiny with coconut oil, the
sarong over her hips. We moved closer to her. I could smell the coconut oil on her skin.
I heard her say, her voice hissing like water falling onto hot coals, ‘Yes.
I’m sure! You’d better get over here.’ I knew that I needed to sit
down for this. Mum was glowing redder and hotter, and the smell of coconut was making me
feel ill. I sat on the stairs. Corwin had his hand on Mum’s shoulder. She replaced
the receiver and turned towards me. A flame-ball of fury rolled from her and engulfed me
whole.