The House at the Edge of the World (5 page)

There is a gap in time. Corwin tells me
that he wanted to run to Brock Point, but that Mum, already dialling the police, said,
‘No. I need you here.’ And that I sat on the stairs and didn’t move.
But all that is gone from my memory. The next thing I remember is Fuck Off Bob sitting
in our armchair, crying and emitting hangover fumes. Even I am prepared to admit that on
a normal day he was a good-looking man, big and dark, with those shoulder-length brown
locks, which he claimed to be an inheritance from a washed-up survivor of the Spanish
Armada. But hung over and crying, his carefully cultivated piratical appearance took on
the quality of a dishevelled morning-after fancy-dress costume. Corwin and I sat at
either side of Mum on the chesterfield, facing him, and watched him snivel.
‘I’m so sorry!’ Snivel, snivel. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The
tears ran into the handsome crags of his cheeks and dripped off his chin. All I could
think of was how much I hated him; that, if my father was dead, I wanted Bob to be dead
as well, or maybe even instead, but just very painfully, brokenly, dead.

Bob had woken up on the shag-pile rug
(bought so that he could say
shag
-pile) with the feeling that something had
happened – something awful and irrevocable. He said – more than once, ‘It was such
a good night!’ He was trying to give it some context: all that jolly good fun, we
were to understand, was an essential element in the story. My father had been
happy
as he
fell off the cliff, or he had fallen off the
cliff
because
he was happy. It was hard to distinguish the subtleties. Bob
sounded like a Devon rustic – all those years of taking the piss out of Devon rustics
saying what a ‘good noiyt’ it had been, and the accent had stuck.

The part of the story with which we were
grappling was that Bob had watched my father fall off a cliff, then gone home. We
expressed this conceptual difficulty. Why had it not occurred to him to call the police?
‘You don’t understand,’ he sobbed. ‘I was out of it! I
didn’t know what was going on …’ His manly frame convulsed in the armchair,
a bagpipe wheeze of despair filled the room, and he started apologizing again.

The shock had brought out our default
characters. Mum was too angry to speak. Corwin was trying to be civilized. In the end it
fell to me to say, ‘Look, Bob, we don’t give a flying fuck about how sorry
you are. Just begin at the beginning and take it from there.’

So, this is the story of my father’s
death:

It had been a good night. There had been
much merry, merry monthing of May and still more pinting of Old Peculier and even my
father had cheered up by the time they rang the bell. He and Bob were laughing all the
way home. (‘Not quite,’ I interrupted. ‘What?’ said Bob.
‘Not quite all the way home,’ I said.)

It was such a beautiful night, so beautiful,
that when they got to Brock Tor they were overcome with nostalgia and a need to urinate
into the chine, for old times’ sake. So they wandered off the main path and down
to the cliff edge below the tor and they both took a piss. And my father was laughing,
and Bob himself was laughing so hard he almost passed out – in fact (this bit took some
intellectual effort), he must have passed out. And when he came round Bob just got to
his feet and stumbled home. And it wasn’t until he woke up that it seemed to him
strange that one moment my father had been there, and the next he hadn’t. And then
it
seemed that it was all a bad dream, but when he called Mum it became
less and less like a dream and more like something that had really happened – my father
was laughing at the edge of the cliff and then he fell forward and was gone.

At this moment two versions of the story
were equally true in my mind. My father was dead, but also, this was a colossal fuck-up
of Bob’s that we were going to have to sort out and my father lay on a ledge
somewhere with a broken leg and a fearsome hangover and the coastguard would find him.
Already, there was a helicopter buzzing about over Brock Tor.

Then Matthew came in. He had been off on his
morning walk. It was so natural for him to be gone at that time of day that we had
forgotten about him. He already knew that the house was all wrong, that none of us was
where we ought to have been. He came in and said, ‘Something has happened to John,
hasn’t it?’

Mum spoke for the first time since Bob had
started crying. She said, ‘I need a drink.’ She stood up, walked past
Matthew and left the room.

Matthew said, ‘Corwin?’

Corwin was strangely alert, his normal
lassitude gone, his limbs neatly arranged. He said, very precisely: ‘Dad fell off
the cliff last night.’

The familiar face of my grandfather dropped
away, the face I always saw because it was the beloved face that was always there, and I
saw him as he looked to the world: old and thin-haired, his brown-splashed hands shaking
slightly. He remained standing and looked down at those hands, lifting them and holding
them apart.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Brock Tor.’

Bob was crying again. Matthew looked around
for a chair, and Corwin jumped up to find him one, taking it from the writing desk in
the corner and supporting Matthew’s arm as he sat. His hand remained on
Matthew’s shoulder. Matthew looked from
Corwin to me to Bob. I
heard the clink of ice falling into a glass in the kitchen.

At last, Matthew said, ‘Morwenna,
dear. Bob seems to be in some distress. Why don’t you make him a cup of tea while
Corwin tells me what has happened?’

In the kitchen, Mum was drinking gin. I put
on the kettle and fished around in the cupboard for tea. ‘Who’s that
for?’ she asked.

‘Bob,’ I said.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’
said Mum. ‘Give the poor man a proper drink!’ And she grabbed a glass and
opened the freezer door and pulled out the ice tray and pressed ice cubes out with her
thumbs as if she were strangling the chickens. Then she filled the glass with gin and
shoved it into my hands.

The cold of the glass on my palms woke me
up. ‘I don’t want to go back in there,’ I said.

She opened her mouth to say something, but
instead glared at me and tutted as she snatched the glass from my hand and strode off
through the hall. I sat at the kitchen table. The sky was thrush-egg blue, the triangle
of sea beyond the church spire a deeper velvety damson. Somewhere over the coast path
the helicopter buzzed, but I could not see it.

The doorbell rang. Corwin went to answer it.
I heard him greet the policemen and lead them into the living room. Then he came to the
kitchen, took my hand and led me upstairs, where we lay on his bed. I rested my head on
his shoulder and he stroked my hair for a very long time. On Corwin’s bedroom wall
Che Guevara gazed off into the distance in a revolutionary reverie. And suddenly I began
to laugh. Corwin said, ‘Morwenna! Stop it. What the hell are you laughing
at?’

But I couldn’t stop it. Through my
laughter I managed to say, ‘Che Guevara!’ And then he saw it too. And he
started to laugh and we rolled over onto our stomachs and buried our faces in the pillow
so that no one could hear us and we shook as we laughed into the pillow because it was
the end, you see, of all
our surrogate sympathies. We were going to
have to experience pain for ourselves.

On the edge of our world people searched
for my father. The coastguard were sending abseilers, we had been told, down the chine
‘to have a look’, which I took to mean, ‘for bits of your
father’s brain’. But that brilliant day turned out to have been the last day
of summer. In the afternoon the rains came over. If there was anything to find, it had
been washed away.

After two days of rain came the sea mist.
Trapped in our attic, Corwin and I watched it roll up the combe towards us and wrap
itself around the house. It sat there like the suspension of time. Three days after my
father’s fall, Matthew called us all together. The police wanted to speak to us.
They were not hopeful of finding him alive, they said, as though this was not obvious to
us. Matthew said, in pain, ‘Ah, well. We have lived so long with the sea. The
tribute is long overdue.’

Mum let out an incredulous choking
‘Christ!’ And Corwin, not meaning to, laughed – but not unkindly, and not at
anyone in particular.

Matthew placed his hand over Mum’s and
said, ‘Valerie dear, it’s time to call off the search.’

Her hands flew to her head, but he insisted.
‘The sea has had him now,’ he said. ‘Believe me, dear. We don’t
want what’s left over when she’s done with him.’

I thought of my father in the sea’s
embrace. He once told me that mermaids mate with drowning men and that he remembered
seeing a mermaid from the cabin steps. He knew that they didn’t exist, he said,
and that she could not have been real. But still, he said, the memory was clear. She was
very dark, and not at all pretty: ‘Sly, she was,’ he said. She scowled at
him and slid into the water. There she is, on Matthew’s map, sitting on a rock,
her tail in the water. She is the colour of granite, of mackerel.

When Matthew said that we
owed the sea tribute, in the moment between Mum’s choke of despair and
Corwin’s laugh, I thought: She was jealous. The sea was jealous of our moment of
inattention, our one act of fire worship, and she took my father in retribution.

But, of course, I had to remind myself, it
would probably not have been the water that killed my father. It would have been the
rock.

The house was besieged by well-wishers. There
are few cruelties to compare with the solicitude of concerned neighbours. We hid in the
house, not daring to go out. Offerings began to appear on our doorstep: chicken pies and
apple crumbles and Lancashire hot pots, labelled with freezing instructions, as unwanted
as the little corpses left there over the years by our semi-feral cats – mice, voles,
the odd disgusting rat, birds (always to my father’s distress) and, once (to
mine), a rabbit kit.

Some of the bolder and more curious simply
opened the front door and strode into our house to tend us. May Rowsell, whose purple
rinse cunningly disguised her steely meddlesomeness, took to dropping by, coming in
without knocking and chirruping, ‘Just checking to see how you are, dears!’
When she talked to Mum her voice took on the same Edwardian music-hall contortions that
she applied to her appearances in those village entertainments, which were never over
before she had minced across the stage in a hat and embroidered shawl, swinging a
birdcage and squeaking out ‘My Old Man’. Corwin and I thought about rescuing
Mum from her, but didn’t feel up to it.

We didn’t dare lock the front door, as
though conscious that this would cause offence. Our bereavement placed upon us the duty
to receive sympathy. Matthew hid in his study, Corwin and I in our rooms. On the rare
occasions when I ventured downstairs I encountered yet another familiar face doing
‘something useful’, like dusting, or mowing the lawn, or carrying a tea tray
in the direction of my not-quite-widowed mother.

Finally, as if summoned by incantation,
Mum’s sister, Jane, materialized out of the mist. She appeared in the hallway one
day, just as May Rowsell was busying around collecting up untouched
mugs of cold tea. May and Jane appraised each other and immediately Jane had May’s
measure and May disappeared on the spot, leaving behind only the faintest puff of Devon
violets-scented talcum powder and a tray of mugs abandoned on the table next to the
telephone.

Jane was even angrier than Mum, if that was
possible. This was what came of descending to the country. She stood in the hallway and
projected her voice: ‘Hell-O in there! It’s safe to come out now!’
Corwin and I jerked to attention, as though someone had pulled on our strings. We went
downstairs, where Jane glinted, petite and neat, in a shiny mackintosh and patent
leather kitten heels.

‘Where’s your mother?’ she
asked.

Corwin jumped the last two stairs and
attempted to wrest the advantage from Jane by pretending that we had asked her to come.
‘Thank you so much for coming,’ he said, kissing her cheek. ‘Mum is
going to be so relieved to see you!’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Let
me take your coat.’

Mum had not wept a single tear since the day
of my father’s fall. But the heat had gone out of her, and she was now sheathed in
a cool, crisp shell, which restricted her movements. Jane assessed her, and said,
‘You look terrible! I’m running you a bath.’ Mum didn’t argue.
Soon the scents of lavender and rose wafted down the stairs from the bathroom –
aromatherapeutic weapons in Jane’s constant battle against the twin evils of
ageing and dowdiness.

Corwin and I were left alone in the living
room for the first time since Before. The room felt all wrong – counterfeit. It was
missing an essential but intangible element that made it our family room; my
father’s part of its spirit, I presumed. I felt quite detached thinking this
thought. The spirit of a house is organic – it seems a little lopsided after pruning,
but it soon grows in.

‘She’ll be able to replace the
sofa now.’

‘Lay off,
Morwenna!’ said Corwin.

I sat on the sofa. It truly was lumpy and
scratchy and uncomfortable. I was determined to love it.

When Mum and Jane re-emerged, Mum had a
damp, propped-up look about her – like a rag doll that has been dropped in a puddle, put
through the washing-machine and leaned against the radiator. Jane had blow-dried
Mum’s hair and made her put on the shift dress that she had bought for my
father’s Christmas work do.

Jane ordered a light supper from me and
aperitifs from Corwin. I put on some boots and went to garner salad. The mist still hung
over the garden, which drooped and dripped. It was in mourning. There were weeds among
the root vegetables, the courgettes had swelled to marrows, and a number of overripe
tomatoes had fallen from the vines and lay rotting on the soil. I pulled at the weeds in
a half-hearted attempt at rescue, but it was no good. The garden was doomed. As I
snipped at the salad leaves I thought: She will dig up the vegetables. She will get rid
of the chickens. She will replace the sofa. And then I realized. Mum could do none of
those things because she could never, now, win the argument. The deep unfairness of this
struck home. No wonder she was so angry.