The House at the Edge of the World (8 page)

A procession of people passed into our house
and before my eyes in a jumbling of fragments of my childhood that made me feel, for a
moment, as if I were the one moving into the next world with my life unfolding before
me. I was hugged in turn by Willow, Mickey and Oliver, who would, or could, not stop
crying, perhaps, I thought, because he felt it his duty to cry on my behalf. He sobbed
on my shoulder: ‘I really loved your father!’ I had had no idea. I could not
imagine when he had had the opportunity to love my father. Corwin chatted with Sandra
Stowe, which was a gross betrayal. Sandra and I were old, old enemies. She probably
couldn’t remember why any more than I could. As soon as I had the opportunity I
hissed at Corwin, ‘What’s
she
doing here?’

‘She was fond of Dad.’

‘What do you mean she was fond of Dad?
She didn’t even know Dad!’

Clearly, Corwin had slept with her when I
was not paying
attention. ‘Of course she did,’ said Corwin.
‘She used to come over with her dad when we were small. Try and be
nice!’

‘She was a little thug!’

‘No. You were a little thug – you used
to beat everyone up with words.’

‘She started the whole “Morwenna
the witch” thing.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Corwin.
‘And if she did, you probably provoked her. Anyway, you were both about
seven!’

‘Well, I’ll give her one thing.
She’s not pig-faced and pregnant yet. Although it can only be a matter of
time.’

When most of the guests had left we sneaked
up to our rooms with our friends. Mickey sat drunkenly on the floor next to
Corwin’s record player, putting on songs and taking them off again before they
were finished. He was trying to find the definitive song, the one that would suspend the
moment in amber, but he failed.

Oliver, I thought, had left early, but the
next morning when, after a restless sleep, I went down at six, I found him in the
kitchen making tea.

‘I thought you’d
gone.’

‘I crashed on your sofa,’ he
said. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course I
don’t.’

Oliver’s face was full of concern for
me. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Fine. I think,’ I said.
‘Yesterday was nice …’ I corrected myself, ‘I mean, it was what it
ought to have been, don’t you think?’

He nodded, but in a slightly masculine,
disapproving way. My answer had been inadequate.

‘When are you off?’ I asked.

‘Thursday.’

‘Wait there,’ I said.
‘I’ve got something for you.’

Oliver had not been in the room when I had
handed out my
leaving presents. I went upstairs, retrieved the last
accordion book and put it into his hands. He gently pulled on the slender ribbon that
held the pages in place, and unfolded it on the kitchen table. His eyes scanned the
verses. When he looked up they were tearful.

‘Don’t be sad for us,
Oliver,’ I said, because he couldn’t speak. ‘We’ll be all
right.’

‘It’s lovely,’ he said
finally. He smiled. ‘It’s our childhood.’

I was pleased. You could always trust Oliver
to understand the important point. He folded it back together and carefully tied it up.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’d better be going.’

‘I’ll go with you as far as the
footbridge,’ I said.

We walked down the hill in silence; the
morning was chilly, blue edged with gold. As we passed the lichgate Oliver asked,
‘Do you think this has changed you?’

‘Probably,’ I said.

I remember, now, his look of slight
disappointment. I ought to have been transfigured by something so momentous. At the
footbridge we hugged goodbye, and he walked on towards the coast path, his long hair
shining in the low sun.

I stopped at the church on the way back up,
sat and read the memorial tablets for a while, then ambled home. And a week or two later
we all scattered off to our adulthoods and began to forget each other.

Corwin left for India. I gave him the copy of
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
. I re-read it recently and, of course, it is a
completely different story from the one I remembered. In the sixth form we read it as a
noble battle against the Money God. Gordon Comstock was our hero. I had forgotten that
he fails to escape the conventional course of job, wife, child, and aspidistra on the
occasional table.

I went to London. Nowadays, it is all shiny,
with pale pressure-washed pavements and
al fresco
foamy coffee. We have stopped
worrying about Mutually Assured Destruction and the demise of the trade unions and we
worship the Money God without shame. But the London that I found when I first arrived
was depression grey with tired, smoke-filled buses. Coffee was instant, the pavements
lined with
al fresco
sleepers, young, male, northern or Scottish. There were no
Poles, Bulgarians, Estonians or Russians. They were all corralled behind the Iron
Curtain, which at the time seemed unfair on them, but also to keep them safe, at least,
from Margaret Thatcher and The-Americans. There were three student tribes: the Political
(donkey jackets, Dr Martens boots), the Apolitical (vintage pillbox hats, mohair batwing
jumpers) and the Tories (stripes and pearls, rugby shirts). Safely beyond the range of
Corwin’s social conscience, my sense of outrage at injustice, both national and
global, dissipated. It was sad, it really was, for all those lost young men along the
Strand and under Waterloo Bridge, but it had ever been thus (I took comfort from the
phrase – it lent a certain historical distance to the problem). I took to rooting around
Oxfam shops and wearing diamanté brooches and clicked on uncomfortable sixties stiletto
heels past
the buckets rattled at the university gate on behalf of
The-Palestinians and The-Sandinistas.

Already by the Christmas break of my first
year, Thornton seemed improbable. I was far more comfortable alone among the shoals of
solitudes slipping through London than I had been intimately sharing the cavernous
loneliness of the coast. I began to think of Thornton as a caricature of itself, one
populated by the creatures that inhabited Matthew’s map.

Mum suggested that we spend the Christmas
holidays in London. ‘It will just be too grim in Thornton, darling! I’m
going slightly mad – I actually miss your father pottering about in his vegetable patch!
And Matthew and I have nothing to say to each other so we have to be meticulously polite
all the time, which is utterly exhausting! Let’s go out. I’ll take you
shopping.’

I was glad. I had been dreading Christmas.
Matthew wouldn’t come up, of course, so Mum stayed in a hotel and we met up on the
steps of the National Gallery. ‘Darling, you lucky thing!’ she said, over
tea. ‘I used to love coming here. My parents used to bring me – as you know, they
didn’t have an imaginative bone in their bodies, but they had the idea that young
ladies should look at art.’

My maternal grandparents had been old
parents, and my memory of them was fragmented. I remembered houses side by side, sloped
driveways, hydrangeas, acres of carpet, a lot of rules. Children were not allowed in the
drawing room.

‘Actually,’ Mum said defiantly,
‘I’m thinking of signing up for an art-history degree.’

‘Oh, God, no! Really?’

‘Why,’ asked Mum, icily,
‘would you say that?’

‘Well, it’s such a cliché,
isn’t it? Bored, middle-class, middle-aged housewives and all that.’

‘Thank you, darling. You’re
always so tactful!’

But when we walked around the gallery, I
could see that she
responded to the paintings – drew energy from them.
She sighed as we left. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I could never persuade
your father to come to London. He didn’t see the point.’

‘I don’t see why that stopped
you coming.’

Mum smiled. ‘Well, Morwenna.
You’re eighteen. You wouldn’t.’

As I settled into my London life, I thought
often of Corwin and Matthew, rarely of my mother and almost never of my father and began
to resign myself to my limited capacity for love. It was sufficient, I told myself, to
love only two people and not to whore around with my affections. The enthusiastic and
indiscriminate flirtations of my fellow students appalled me – their profligate
copulations, all that mascara-streaked post-coital regret. I made … not what I could
call ‘friends’ yet, but close enough. We met between lectures in the Nelson
Mandela Bar and drank half-pints of Guinness, and at the weekends we took never-ending
bus journeys to go to parties in Victorian terraces in parts of town too obscure even to
be labelled unfashionable. We danced earnestly in flock-wallpapered rooms; the cheap
lino on the kitchen floors swam with beer. We slept on sofas. It took all of Sunday to
find the way home.

To Corwin I wrote of other, more important,
things. How, on these homing Sundays, I gathered gifts to myself: the circles of gas
holders against thunder clouds; the profane poetry of a drunk’s rantings; the blue
of painted angels’ wings. His replies came on flimsy airmail paper. After a while
I noticed that his letters were full of people and mine were not.

That first summer, when Corwin came back
from India, I found him a little less like himself. Or, perhaps, he made me feel less
like myself: pallid, too sharp in my movements. Or, perhaps, we were each more like our
own selves. There was an Indian languor still in his limbs, and his skin was very dark.
With his black hair and
eyes he looked as though he had been claimed
for the south. He shivered in the July sunshine. (It passed. His skin paled and he soon
speeded up again. But later, when his periods away became much longer than those at
home, he would find it harder to reset himself.)

The house was a little shabbier – this was
how we felt our father’s absence, in the stiff door handles, the swelling of the
wooden draining-board around the sink, the drip of the bathroom tap. A fox had taken
advantage of the neglected chicken run, and had made off with the chickens. My father
had been so quiet that we only noticed now how his constant activity had resounded like
a bass note through our lives. Thornton was strangely silent without him. ‘I must
get a man in,’ said Matthew, sadly.

On the anniversary of our father’s
death, Mum held a family dinner in the garden. She laid out a white tablecloth and the
ancestral dinner service, all set off with a vase of flowers freshly picked from the
garden. We ate summer food – gazpacho and fresh bread, lightly steamed courgettes tossed
in olive oil and lemon juice with char-grilled chicken, late strawberries. When we had
finished eating, Matthew brought out the coffee and the porcelain tea cups. He had saved
the cream from the top of the milk for the occasion.

Corwin talked. He had discovered his
vocation. He would move water! All that water, all his childhood, how could he ever have
imagined, clinging to his hot-water bottle at night, under the damp, scratchy blankets,
the desert and the drought? How the soil turns to dust? ‘They use sprinklers to
keep the country clubs green!’ he said. There was a new note to his scorn, I
noticed, a quiet, tensioned zeal. ‘The water mains are only switched on for twenty
minutes a day, and the rich have lawns! It’s some
insane colonial
hangover
!’

Matthew was stuffing his pipe with tobacco.
He didn’t know what to say. He had spent decades training himself to avoid the
unpleasant. In the vase were bright orange crocosmia, red and pink
roses, purple salvia. I thought of all the colours of India, the dusty bangled ankles. I
would never go there. I thought of the constant unconscious adjustment of the saris of
the women picking over the vegetable stalls of Brick Lane, and of those saris hidden
under winter coats, of all the greys of London.

‘And swimming-pools!’ added
Corwin.

‘Well, I think it’s
admirable!’ said Matthew, standing up. ‘Most admirable. Water engineering!
John would have liked the sound of that.’ He excused himself and went to pay his
evening homage to the sea. There was less of him. My father’s death had diminished
him, worn him away at the edges.

Mum leaned back into her chair and smiled
and sighed, ‘My beautiful children!’ And meant it, for once. This was a gift
from her to her twins – food, wine, maternal pride – a reprieve. Because coiled up in
her breast was the news, which she delivered to us over the thick dregs of the coffee,
that she was moving in with Fuck Off Bob.

‘Well, darlings,’ she said,
‘I wasn’t exactly expecting you to be over the moon about it. But I am
entitled to love after widowhood. You can’t expect me to squat here with Matthew
for the rest of my life.’

Corwin gave my ankle a lazy kick before I
could refer to Bob’s repugnant groping hands. He didn’t pretend to be
discreet about it. It was simply that we all knew what I was thinking and that there was
no point in revisiting the subject.

‘Of course not, Mum,’ he said.
‘We’re glad you’ve found someone. We’ll get used to the idea.
And you’re looking great, by the way.’

She
was
looking great. Some of it,
presumably, was merry widowhood, but some of it was new, expensive, clothing. Bought, I
realized, now that I was paying attention, with Bob’s money, which he had made
from his lucrative antiques and architectural salvage business, built up by prising
family heirlooms from senile
widows entering nursing homes. So much for
impassioned speeches about financial independence, I thought to say, but I restrained
myself.

‘I won’t,’ I said,
recalcitrant. ‘I won’t ever get used to it.’

‘Well, darling,’ said Mum,
magnanimously, ‘graciousness has never been your strong point.’

Corwin laughed, took Mum’s hand and
kissed it. ‘Ah, it’s good to be home!’ He sighed and, keeping hold of
Mum’s hand, reached to take mine. I acquiesced. I found that he was not so
altered, after all. His virtue was still intact. It was still the most irritating thing
about him.