The House at the Edge of the World (7 page)

‘Nothing. Has Mum gone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you miss Dad yet?’ I
asked.

‘Not yet. Do you?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I
suppose we will.’

‘Yes,’ said Corwin. ‘I
suppose we will.’

Our friends had all written to say that they
didn’t know what to say. I missed them. I missed them more than I missed my
father, which began to alarm me. In my room I worked on my parting gift for them, an
edition of five little accordion books, which unfolded to reveal the wavering length of
coast from the headland to Thornton Mouth blind-stamped into the thick soft white paper.
Above the coastline, printed in blue and staggered in a way to suggest waves, I had set
the lines of a poem by Robert Frost about looking out to sea. I had surprised myself by
creating something pretty. It was called ‘Neither Out Far Nor In Deep’:

The people along the sand

All turn and look one way.

They turn their back on the land.

They look at the sea all day.

I had planned to make an extra copy for
Matthew, but he had reminded me of how much he feared the sea and I didn’t want to
appear tactless.

On Corwin’s desk a pile of envelopes
in pretty pastel colours accumulated, which sighed at the gorgeous tragedy of it all. By
the time we took our A levels Corwin had trysted with most of the girls in the fifth and
sixth forms. They all fell for his big warm black eyes and thick dark lashes and he was
so chivalrous – our father had taught him always to hold the door open and to offer to
help with heavy bags. Sex was an extension of courtesy for Corwin – it seemed impolite
to brush off a girl who was going to such great lengths to be liked, and he submitted to
their need for
affirmation in various wind-sheltered dips in the
beaches, or corners of houses vacated for the weekend by parents. No one seemed to
resent him for it.

He began to experience cabin fever. We were
still imprisoned by the weather and our fear of meeting people who would ask us how we
were. At last he broke down and demanded that we leave the house. ‘We’ll
take the bikes,’ he announced. ‘That way we won’t have to talk to
anyone we don’t like.’

The mist had thinned to a half-hearted rain,
and we were soaked even before we got to the top of the hill. Corwin took off ahead of
me, his black drain-piped legs pedalling maniacally. Then he swooped down the hill
between the curving hedgerows, his arms outspread, his outsize black jumper flapping
like wings – Crow, liberated. I followed more slowly. I didn’t like to take my
hands off the handlebars. Corwin disappeared around a bend and by the time I had him
back in my sight we were out from under the rain, and the town lay below us around the
curve of The Sands, backing up into the hills, brightened from a gap in the clouds by a
wash of cool blue. Corwin stopped to wait for me.

‘Only three more weeks!’ he
said.

‘Why do we hate it so much?’

Corwin shrugged his shoulders.
‘It’s a seaside town,’ he said. ‘They’re essentially
unlovable. They never deliver what they promise.’

‘Oliver doesn’t hate
it.’

‘Oliver is inclined to
love.’

‘What does that say about us?’ I
asked, suddenly panicked.

‘I love you,’ said Corwin.
‘That’s enough.’

‘Yes,’ I conceded. ‘I
suppose so. And Matthew,’ I added.

For the first time, I felt apprehensive
about being separated from Corwin. ‘I wish you weren’t going so far
away,’ I said.

‘I’ll be back.’

We laid down our bikes and sat on the wet
grass at the edge of the road. The sea was iron – hard and unforgiving.

‘Matthew
hasn’t said anything more about a memorial service,’ I said.

‘He thinks Mum should be
involved.’

‘There’s something wrong with
us.’

‘They just need time.’

Suddenly I could not bear the idea of town.
‘Let’s go to the cabin,’ I said.

Corwin winced. ‘We can’t go down
to the cabin.’

‘Why not?’

‘Haven’t you noticed that
Matthew hasn’t been down since?’

I had not noticed. How had I not noticed?
Matthew normally went down every night after dinner. The bile burned at my throat. I
suddenly understood why he had stopped going. He was worried about what the currents
might deliver. Corwin slotted his fingers between mine and for a while we said
nothing.

‘What will we do when Matthew dies and
we inherit the house?’ I asked.

‘I guess we’ll end up living in
it, eventually, when we’re older. When we’ve done something with our lives.
We’ll feel differently about it. It will be ours.’

‘What? With our spouses and our hordes
of children in some kind of hippie commune?’

‘I’ll never get married,’
said Corwin. ‘Or have children. The world is overcrowded enough already. No – I
mean when we’re old and run out of steam, when we’ve seen the world and are
ready to watch the sea and grow vegetables. I’ve always just assumed that you and
I will end up back here somehow. I picture you with your hair in a grey bun and wearing
a long apron, with me standing next to you holding a pitchfork!’

‘Oh, please! And what if I want to
have children?’

‘You should have children if you
want.’

I was not sure that I did want. But a future
without husband or children and with only Corwin in it – and a few chickens? Maybe a
goat? My father had always wanted a goat. I could not see it. On the
point of escape Corwin was talking about return. I could only imagine walking on and
out, out of Matthew’s circle and away.

‘Let’s make a vow,’ Corwin
said, suddenly and enthusiastically. He liked big binding promises. ‘Let’s
swear never to marry or have children and to be old together at Thornton.’

‘How are we going to afford Thornton?
We’re going to have to sell it eventually. And, anyway, no! I can’t swear to
that.’

‘We have to keep Thornton going. We
have no choice.’

‘Yes, we do. We have a
choice!’

Corwin’s calm assumption that he and I
would decay and die at Thornton whispered dread into my ear. A world twenty-four miles
in diameter might be sufficient for Matthew, but not for me. Until that moment,
Matthew’s map had always been an endearing eccentricity: one man’s one
painting, never to be completed. ‘A whole world is contained here,’ he
preached. ‘Sufficient for a lifetime of discovery.’ And then he would wave
his walking stick at some shy patch of colour in the hedgerow, and shout,
‘What’s that, then?’ And, when we didn’t know, we were like the
unbelievers in
Peter Pan
: somewhere, the flower of a rare fleabane or speedwell
wilted on its stalk; Matthew heard its dying scream. ‘You are appalling
children,’ he would say good-naturedly. ‘Ignorant as stone! Which might be
excusable, if you possessed any curiosity whatsoever!’ Now, for the first time, I
saw the map as perhaps Mum saw it: slightly sinister – as if he wrought some subtle
magic in the unending painting of it that bound us to Thornton.

‘This is an absurd
conversation,’ I snapped. ‘Stop it!’

‘OK!’ said Corwin, and stood up,
pulling me to my feet after him. We picked up our bikes. ‘Still want to go
back?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Let’s
carry on. It’s time to face humanity.’

Mum returned from Jane’s composed and
generous, just after our A level results came out. ‘Darlings,’ she said.
‘I’m so proud of you!’ Her hair was a silky chestnut bob and she had
acquired a
jacket with shoulder pads. ‘I really had been letting
myself go,’ she confided to me. ‘You know, your father never exactly
embraced change. And now you’re leaving!’ she added, startlingly.
‘It’s a good thing, darling. Really. I should have persuaded your father to
move. I wasn’t doing any of us any favours by being so biddable.’

Corwin and I suspected Jane of arranging for
some doctor to prescribe anti-depressants for Mum, and we went through her things one
afternoon when she had gone into town, and through her handbag when she returned, but we
found no evidence to support our theory.

Matthew had resumed his evening walks to the
sea. Time was pooling into the space left by my father. Soon that space would fill and I
would not have mourned him. The thought filled me with panic. Mum and Matthew were still
standing off over the memorial service. Corwin began to pack for India.

‘There’s something wrong with
us,’ I said. In the kitchen Mum hummed along to a couple of bars of the
Archers
theme tune. ‘It’s because he’s not at
rest,’ I said. ‘There’s a reason people have funerals. You have to
send their souls across.’

‘Across what?’ asked Corwin.

‘Across whatever is between us and the
other side, wherever that is.’ I imagined a flaming boat on a still tide.

‘We need a ceremony,’ I said.
‘I can’t bear to think of his soul being stuck.’ At the bottom of the
sea, I thought, entangled in seaweed.

Corwin rolled up a pair of patched jeans and
stuffed them into the battered old Karrimor rucksack that had been the crowning gift of
Christmas 1983. ‘I don’t believe in it,’ he said.

‘In what?’

‘In any of it – the after-life, the
soul. And neither, incidentally, did Dad.’

‘Yes, he did! He believed in the soul,
at least. He thought everything had a soul.’

‘No, he
didn’t,’ said Corwin. ‘He believed in some overarching principle of
nature, but not in individual souls.’

‘That’s it, then? We just leave?
I can’t bear it,’ I shouted. ‘I can’t bear the nothingness of
it. There’s something wrong with us!’

‘Why do you keep saying that?
You’re getting hysterical. There’s nothing wrong with us!’

But there was. ‘I think it’s a
good thing we’re going our separate ways,’ I yelled, and ran downstairs to
comfort myself with Matthew, but he was not in his study. I was just about to leave the
room, when it occurred to me to consult the map. I wondered, fearfully, what it would
have to say about all this. I forced my gaze to Brock Tor and braced myself to see a
falling figure, but there was none. Matthew could hardly be expected to paint his own
son’s death, but the omission upset me. I wondered if he had put my father in the
water, and reached for the magnifying-glass on the desk. But I lost courage, and
didn’t seek him there. I replaced the magnifying-glass and left the room.

Instead I searched the house for a box with
a key, and emptied it of its contents and took it to Corwin and Matthew and Mum and
asked each to put in something associated with my father. ‘So, you have
John’s sentimental streak, after all!’ said Mum, but sadly enough for me to
forgive her the aspersion. None of us was to look in the box – simply slip in the
object, so that we would not know what had gone into it. It had to be a secret between
each of us and my father’s memory. It still is a secret. Then I took the box to
the kitchen garden and blindly inserted a trowelful of soil before locking it.

On a rising tide I walked to Brock Tor and
pushed through the gorse patch to stand above the chine. Fed by all that rainfall, the
stream now shot out of the cliff. To the north-east there was a black sheet of rain, but
where I stood the sun shone and there was a light onshore wind. I forced myself close
enough to the edge to be able to hurl the box over the waterfall and into the cove
below. It floated there for a while, slowly nudged by the tide
towards
a fissure between two up-facing blades of granite at the base of the cliff. What if it
didn’t sink? Or break up? What if it washed up on the beach? That was not what I
wanted at all. A wave came over and ground it into the rock. It bobbed back up, a dark
smudge on dark water, as though in defiance – of me, so it seemed. But then another wave
hit hard and, withdrawing, dragged the box along a jagged ridge, where it twisted and
bounced violently in the white water. The next wave slammed it under the cliff, out of
view. The rain had reached me now, but I stood and waited for a long while to see if the
box would reappear. It didn’t.

At home Corwin asked, ‘Well, did it
work?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not
really.’

‘Well, there you go,’ he said.
‘Don’t say I didn’t tell you.’

But perhaps, after all, the box performed
some act of release, because that evening Matthew called a family summit and we set a
date for a memorial service. The conventions soothed us, and we were kinder to each
other. We agreed to ask Mark Luscombe to deliver the eulogy, mainly because, as local GP
and chairman of the Thornton Players, he could be trusted to be heard in the back seats.
We booked caterers, and informed people of the date, and chatted with the vicar, and
chose passages from the Bible that sounded secular enough for our tastes, and generally
behaved as if there were a body to bury or burn and take our leave of.

We dressed in black. I put on each item
carefully – black tights, black blouse, black velvet skirt, black shoes. It was fitting
and calming, and when I looked at myself in the mirror I saw someone in mourning and
felt relief. At the church porch we greeted people in the honeyed autumn sun. The air
smelt sweet, of leaves on the ground.

Inside the church, we sat in the front pew.
‘Lost at sea,’ whispered the church walls. ‘Lost at sea.’ The
church was full. I had
never noticed that any of these people knew my
father. They cried at the moving bits. Mark talked about my father’s love of music
and nature, his gentle smile. Then he said, ‘John always made me think of Sir
Galahad. He was uncorrupted by the vices of our age. He was chivalrous. He was pure of
heart. And he was on a quest – for his personal Holy Grail, his perfect fifteen
acres.’

This raised an affectionate melancholy
laugh, but it was unfortunate. The closest my father and Matthew had ever come to a row
was two years earlier, when Matthew insisted on selling off the remaining acres of what
had once been Thornton Farm to the farmer who leased them from him, and who promptly
acquired planning permission to build a caravan site. My father had always harboured
ideas that he would farm them himself one day. It was not a realistic dream. Mum never
believed that he could make it work. In the dry-eyed front pew, I took Matthew’s
hand and squeezed it. But at the same time I caught a glimpse of something dark and
formless, the beginning of a thought that I could not yet complete.