The House at the Edge of the World (9 page)

‘Does Matthew know?’ I
asked.

‘Of course.’

‘And?’

‘And what? What does he think about
it? Is that what you’re asking? Well, darling, he’s far too polite to tell
me what he thinks, but certainly he understands about widowhood, and about loneliness.
And he’ll be glad to see the back of me.’

A vast bank of ludicrously puffy clouds had
formed above the trees and had taken on a shade of gold so fierce that it appeared as
though a heavenly host was about to erupt from them to deliver blessing upon Mum and
Bob’s treacherous couplings. Mum smiled at the skies and basked in the warmth of
her own indifference.

I let go of Corwin’s hand.
‘I’m going down to the cabin,’ I said.

At Thornton Mouth, Matthew sat on the cabin
steps watching a couple of surfers. I sat down next to him. It was so restful, the way
that he rarely commented on arrivals or departures. The surfers were seal-shadows on the
darkening swell; they were losing their light, but still they waited for the
just-one-more. ‘How patient they are!’ said Matthew.

‘They should come in.’

‘Ah!’ said Matthew. ‘You
are too timorous! It has always been the Venton curse.’

‘I thought
seasickness had always been the Venton curse.’

‘Well, in the Ventons it amounts to
the same thing. We dream of crossing the sea, but we are constitutionally
incapable.’

‘Corwin’s not timorous.’ I
picked up a black pebble with a thick white stripe running through it and balanced it on
the flat of my palm.

‘Well, he gets that from your
mother.’

‘She just told us about
Bob.’

‘Yes, I can see that.’

Suddenly, one of the surfers found a wave
and was up on the board, zigzagging his way along the edge of the sunset.

‘I actually feel sick!’

‘How you exaggerate, Morwenna,’
said Matthew, mildly.

I put the pebble in my pocket. ‘I do!
I feel sick!’

‘It’s all mind over
matter,’ said Matthew.

‘Doesn’t it bother
you?’

‘Why should it?’

The surfers were paddling in.
Matthew’s pipe glowed in the twilight as he sucked on it. I found myself resentful
of the pipe: it seemed unnecessarily anachronistic.

‘Bob was Dad’s best
friend!’

‘Well, then. That gives them a lot in
common.’

‘And it’s so soon!’

‘Morwenna, dear, I do wonder sometimes
at your simplicity. Your mother is only forty-two. She is too young to sit in mourning.
That would be the last thing John would have wanted. He always regretted that it was not
in his nature to be more …
demonstrative
. Valerie suffered a little under his
self-sufficiency, you know.’ He knocked out his pipe, then patted my knee.
‘Let’s go back up.’

‘No.’ I sulked. ‘I’m
going to sleep here.’

I watched him disappear into the dark below
the cliff, and listened to his footsteps on the shingle until the sound went under that
of the waves. The surfers, too, were making their way up the
beach
towards the steps. I went inside and lay down, below the photo of Great-grandfather
James, who never made it to America, alone with my ill-feeling. I was the one who
suffered under Corwin and Matthew’s sanctimony. I felt homesick for London, where
their judgement of me evaporated into the polluted air. It took me a long time to fall
asleep, and when I woke it was to the sound of seagulls squabbling beneath the window.
They were fighting over something rotten, retched up by the tide.

It was daybreak and I was cold. I made my
way home through the gorse and the sleepy sheep. My feet were soaked with dew. At home I
sat on Corwin’s bed, willing him to wake, staring at him so hard that eventually
he opened his eyes and asked, ‘What time is it?’

‘Five-ish.’

‘I’m not prepared to talk about
it,’ he said, turning over. ‘It has nothing to do with us. Go to
bed.’

‘Can I crawl in with you?’

‘As long as you don’t move or
speak before nine.’

I climbed in beside him, fully dressed, and
lay very still on my back. It began to rain. The water was sliding down the slates,
along the gutters, down the pipes and into the drains. So much water.

Two days later Mum moved out, taking nothing
more with her than would fit into the back of Bob’s car. Bob’s locks had
been shorn – a directive of Mum’s, I had no doubt. Corwin helped to load her bags
into the boot, and Bob was so grateful to him for releasing his mother without a fuss
that he accidentally called him ‘mate’, then blenched with embarrassment. I
scowled at them all from the doorstep. Bob pulled out of the driveway with Mum’s
hand waving from the open passenger window.

In the parental bedroom, the duvet was
folded back to air. I opened the wardrobe doors. On my father’s side was a neat
stack of cardboard boxes, on Mum’s a single box. Corwin lifted it out and put it
on the bed. At the top of the box lay a cardboard folder labelled ‘C & M
documents’. It contained our birth certificates and old school reports and
exercise books. Beneath this folder were layers of the framed family photos that had sat
on Mum’s dressing-table and on the window-sill in her craft room. At the bottom of
the box was her wedding album.

‘Bitch!’ I said.

Corwin picked up the album and opened it.
‘Have some understanding, Morwenna,’ he admonished. He leafed through the
pages. ‘Poor them,’ he said. ‘Look at them. They were barely older
than we are – practically children!’

‘Oh, fuck off!’

Corwin grabbed my arm, pulled me down to sit
next to him and gripped me around the shoulders so that I could not move. ‘Look at
them,’ he commanded. He lifted his hand to my head and twisted it so that I was
forced to look at a picture of our
parents flanked by our grandparents.
They all appeared very solemn – not unhappy; rather, grave with import.

‘It’s just a picture,’ I
said.

‘Exactly,’ said Corwin,
triumphant. He ruffled my hair aggressively, released me and lay back on the bed.

‘I suppose the house is ours
now,’ he said. ‘What shall we do with it?’

‘I think, technically, that it’s
still Matthew’s,’ I said, unforgiving.

‘No,’ said Corwin. ‘It
will be ours now. You’ll see. He’ll want to secure our loyalty to the
place.’

‘I never realized that you put so much
thought into these things.’ I looked out of the window at the decayed kitchen
garden, remembering how Mum had told me that when they married it had been a rose
garden, and that my father had dug it up. I imagined her staring out of that window and
seeing there the ghosts of roses. Then I turned and started putting the photos back into
the box. I struggled a little, trying to fold the four leaves of the lid into each
other. Corwin didn’t offer to help me.

‘Look at that!’ he said,
pointing to the corner of the room. ‘Look at all those old wallpapers. I wonder if
Matthew knows about that.’

Corwin was right. The following day,
Matthew invited us to join him for coffee. He asked us to grind the beans, just as we
had when we were children, taking it in turns with the handle of the grinder. Matthew
put the coffee on a tray with milk and sugar, and squares of the darkest chocolate on a
saucer. We followed him into his study. The coffee was thick and grainy; the milk sank
into it as through sand.

‘So …’ he said, handing me a cup
and offering the chocolate. I took two squares and balanced them on my saucer.
‘Here we are.’

Matthew’s desk was
uncharacteristically tidy, his sketchbooks ordered on his shelves – more than half a
century’s worth of
them. He didn’t sit down. This was a
solemn occasion and what he wanted to say must be delivered standing. ‘Your mother
was right to blame me,’ he said. ‘I made no contingency for your father
dying before me. I don’t quite understand why – it was foolish of me. There is no
recent family precedent for sons predeceasing their fathers but, of course, that is
highly unusual. What can I say? There was no obvious threat to John. When I was your age
– you can’t imagine. We were so fearful. But since then the world has come to feel
so fixed. Safe, almost.’

Corwin’s foot twitched. ‘Here,
maybe.’

‘Yes,’ said Matthew. ‘Here
– but here is where we live. Or where I live, perhaps I should say. But let’s not
become distracted. Today we must talk about the house.’

Matthew stood, the map an iridescent halo
encircling him. His head obscured the picture of our house, but the original farmland
radiated around him. Matthew was never meant to be a farmer. My father had been, though.
Again, I glimpsed the shadowy thought that had visited me at my father’s memorial
service and I wondered for the first time if my father had hated Matthew for destroying
his plans for a smallholding when he sold those last pretty fifteen acres. There had
been a copse. My father had taken us there to watch fox cubs. I couldn’t imagine
that my father had had any hatred in him, but it was the closest I had seen him come to
tears. He said, ‘It was always a pipe dream, if I’m honest with
myself.’ And then he started to laugh. ‘It’s all right, Morwenna!
Don’t panic!’ I had been panicking: betrayal, grief. I was not equipped for
big, quiet tides of emotion.

Matthew had the deeds to Thornton on his
desk. ‘I’m making them over to you,’ he said. ‘There will be
issues around inheritance tax, of course. But we will take legal advice on
that.’

Corwin was smiling. This made him happy. I
was simultaneously thinking: Mine, ours! And: It’s not so simple, maintaining this
house, which has been paid for by a century of attrition of
land. There
was no land left with which to top up the maintenance fund. But I didn’t want to
spoil the moment, and I supposed, vaguely, that by the time we would have to worry about
such things Corwin and I would be earning salaries. Matthew said, ‘You may do as
you wish with the house, but the kitchen and my study are sacrosanct. Oh, and you will
ask before removing any books, won’t you?’

He beamed down upon us from the map.
Suddenly, his trouser pocket started ringing shrilly. ‘Ah,’ he said,
contentedly, pulling the timer out of his pocket. ‘The bread!’

It was too much to take in, sitting there
in the house, which was now so overwhelmingly ours. We walked down to the beach without
speaking, apart from when Corwin enthusiastically greeted oncoming walkers with comments
about the weather. I suspected that he was doing it simply to annoy me.

We threw stones into the sea. Corwin’s
forearms were covered with goose-bumps; the bleached hair stood on end in a fine golden
fur.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘We could sell cream teas,’ he
teased.

‘Jesus, Corwin!’

We threw more stones. A rising wind pushed
the cloud-shadow across the surface of the sea.

‘We could get a dog.’

‘I hate dogs.’

‘Well, a goat, then. Dad always wanted
a goat.’

‘I thought you wanted to save the
world.’

‘What I want to do is to earn my
comfort and my peace, not simply have it handed to me.’

‘This time last year we were saying
how much we hated it here.’

‘That was The Sands we were talking
about – that’s not the same thing.’

‘I can’t keep
up with your fine distinctions,’ I said. I had had enough of the conversation.
‘Have you heard from Oliver at all?’

‘No, I haven’t. Have
you?’

‘No. Strange! He loved you so much. He
was always at your heels. He must have found someone else to adore.’

‘Why are you always so catty about
Oliver?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. He has so
much integrity; he wants to save the world too, only he’s so much more severe
about it than you. He’s a permanent reproach. It’s exhausting.’

The sky had opened into sunshine. I lay back
on the shingle. ‘I have no interest in saving the world,’ I said. ‘But
it doesn’t seem to bother you.’

Corwin laughed. ‘Oh, it does,’
he said. ‘But I can’t change that about you. You’ve always been the
detached one.’

‘I’m not the one who goes
running off around the world. I’m still here.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re in
London. London is nowhere.’

‘London is everywhere!’

‘It amounts to the same
thing.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I like
Everywhere-Nowhere.’

We bumped into our old friends in the pubs,
but they seemed to fade with each meeting. Soon they would disappear altogether. Over a
pint at the First and Last, I said, ‘Well, I guess what held us together was our
wanting to leave.’ This insulted Willow, who believed in Friendship and had
written amusing letters to me in generous spiky handwriting about student life in
Manchester. She had a new boyfriend, who had been arrested ‘for possession’,
which made her ever more glamorous. Mickey took refuge at the pool table, heartbroken.
No one had seen Oliver. Back in the autumn he had sent postcards from Wales, where he
was volunteering at the Centre for Alternative Technology, but there had been no news of
him since.

Corwin and I went looking for Oliver at his
parents’ house in
one of the new cul-de-sacs that were refuted by
Matthew’s map. His father opened the door to us, and, when he saw us there, yelled
down the corridor, ‘Sarah! Friends of Oliver’s!’ and shut the door
again. We were used to this and waited for Oliver’s mother to answer. We had
always terrified her, and she fluttered on the doorstep twisting the discreet silver
cross that normally hid beneath the housecoat she wore to do the hoovering. Oliver was
very protective of his mother; Jesus was her friend, which exposed her to ridicule. He
expected his own friends to be gentle with her. Corwin put on his most spiritual smile.
‘Hello, Mrs Finch, how are you?’

‘Corwin!’ She flinched.
‘Gosh, aren’t you brown!’

‘We were wondering when Oliver’s
going to be around.’

She looked a little confused. Perhaps she
had thought that we knew more of her changeling child and his movements than she did.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘He’s still in Wales. I don’t know when
he’s planning on coming home.’