The House at the Edge of the World

by Rochester, Julia

  He appeared exhausted. I could tell that his stamina for this conversation was about to expire. We all failed my mother, he more than any of us – it was somehow connected with why he looked all wrong in a suit. He hated his job. When people asked him what he did for a living, he used to say, ‘I design blights on the landscape.’ Which was a conversation-stopper.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘I promise. It’s not easy for me to be considerate of anyone.’

  He sighed. He had to love me even though I was not considerate. His shoulders bent a little under the burden of it.

  ‘Would you like a lift into town?’ he asked.

  ‘No thanks. I thought I’d walk.’

  He seemed to consider placing a kiss on my forehead, but he would have had to breach the gap between himself and my bed. As he went downstairs I called out, ‘Thanks for the tea.’

  Over the years I reconstructed this last day. It was not a deliberate effort. But subconsciously I gave it significance. It was as though those twenty-four hours both held and withheld my father in essence – like a moth chrysalis on the point of cracking open. When I was able to articulate this thought, Corwin snapped at me. He said, ‘There’s nothing transcendent about death!’ And, by then, he should have known. Nothing distinguished that day. Even the plea to behave better towards my mother was a regular occurrence, which inevitably followed a row.

  They rarely rowed – my father made it difficult for my mother to engage him on points of difference, so their frustration with each other built up slowly until it erupted about something trivial. Corwin and I called them ‘sofa rows’ because the sofa always featured in them: that lumpy, scratchy, Victorian chesterfield, which had been sitting in front of the fireplace on the day that Mum moved in, and had probably been sitting in exactly the same position on the day my grandmother moved in, symbol of the Ventons’ passive tyranny against her. I don’t know how my father and Matthew prevented Mum from placing the slightest personal mark on Thornton – some effort of passive resistance, I supposed. They had conceded the garden room to her in order for her to pursue her crafts. Not that she had any talent for crafts, but it had been the seventies, and it was expected of her: all those poor attempts at quilting, weaving and batik – all in muddy shades of terracotta. And all those pretty, clean, new things patterned with Laura Ashley sprigs, which she sneaked into her room like contraband.

  Corwin and I eavesdropped on the end of that last row.

  ‘I really don’t think,’ Mum was hissing, ‘that it would be extravagant to change a sofa after an entire century.’

  ‘It would be profligate,’ replied my father, ‘to replace something which so adequately performs its function.’

  On the stairs, Corwin and I winced. Our father was quiet in anger, so we measured the level of his rage by the number of sentences completed and how heavy the weight of syllables. Mentally, we translated. What he meant was: ‘It’s part of the house.’ Which sounded fair enough but wasn’t, because Mum wasn’t part of the house. We were all organic to the house, which was organic to the landscape, and she was a foreign body. The sofa represented my mother’s failure to be a good wife and adapt to Thornton, and my father’s failure to be a good husband and adapt Thornton to her. It made her unhappy, we could see that. But we were ruthless. Our sympathies were with Thornton, which was immutable. We thought she should throw in the towel.

  Mum retorted that it would be nice – she repeated this louder, hoping that Matthew would hear: he always made such a fuss about the ‘modern insipid usage’ of the word: ‘It would be nice,’ she yelled, ‘to have some say in what is allegedly my own home. And it would be even nicer to enter the current decade before it is over!’

  We squirmed with discomfort. To suggest entering the eighties was guaranteed to induce a display of wrath from our father. It was the decade of untrammelled greed, of contempt for the unfortunate, of worship of Mammon and the Devil and all his henchmen, and he would have no part in it.

  ‘Valerie,’ he said, in a tone of lacerating disappointment, ‘you know how I feel about all of that.’

  ‘It’s just a bloody sofa!’ screeched Mum. ‘It’s just somewhere to park your arse! It’s hardly the privatization of British Fucking Gas!’

  We heard our father move towards the door and we scuttled up the stairs. He always gave her the last word, but by making an exit, so that she was left addressing the empty room.

  When I came down to breakfast the chickens had escaped and were running all over the front lawn. Mum was sitting on a garden bench holding her face to the sun, her eyes closed. I sat next to her. She said, ‘I hate those chickens.’

  I said, ‘I know you do.’

  She smelt of henna, a dry, grassy scent. She had applied it the day before and there was a red sheen upon her dark hair, except where it was naturally grey and had turned a sad pale orange. I considered her too old for henna. She had missed a bit behind her ear when washing it out. I said, ‘Hold still,’ and lifted up her hair and rubbed at the grey-green crust with my thumb.

  The chickens charged around on the grass, straggling behind their rust-coloured leader, like a bunch of hung-over squaddies. Mum said, ‘I hate the smell – that chicken-shit smell.’

  ‘Where’s Hilda?’ I asked. Hilda was my favourite.

  ‘Behind the fuchsia,’ said my mother. And then, not necessarily referring to Hilda: ‘Poor thing.’ She leaned her head back a little further and closed her eyes, floating on a deep pool of resignation. ‘It smells of dead Tories’ wardrobes,’ she said. ‘Mildewed tweed. That’s what it smells of.’

  Under the fuchsia Hilda was just visible, sitting very, very still behind a cascade of red bell flowers. I looked out beyond the combe to sea. There was no horizon: the morning mist was rising from the water.

  ‘Actually,’ said Mum, ‘what you smell in those wardrobes probably is shit. All that mouse shit under the floorboards. Layers and layers of it deposited there over the centuries. The better the house, the more mouse shit there is – just think how non-U it would be to lift the boards and actually clean it out! You could probably calibrate the entire British class system on the depth of mouse shit under the floor.’

  Corwin appeared in the doorway with a glass of orange juice in his hand and smiled at me. Mum sensed the smile and her eyes snapped open. ‘You two and your secret smiles!’ she said nastily, and stood up. ‘Do something about those bloody chickens.’ She pushed past Corwin and went back into the house.

  Corwin sat down next to me, stretched out his long legs and laid an arm along the back of the bench behind me. I made to get up to deal with the chickens, but Corwin put out a hand and pulled me back. ‘Let them enjoy the illusion of freedom a bit longer,’ he said. ‘They can’t go anywhere.’

  His leg rested against mine. We shared our skin. We were tanned and dusted with gold. This dry world was a revelation, a boon: the pale brittle grass, the hardened soil, the brown crisped leaves. For most of our lives we had been rained upon. From velvety mizzling rains to wind-propelled water darts. Even when it wasn’t raining the droplets hung in the air, patient and immobile as the sheep and cattle that grazed the fields. We had rarely been away from the sound of water moving. There was always a stream or a river churning close by, winding its way, building noise, to thunder over the cliff and join the sea. But that summer, the streams had sunk into the ground. All we could hear were the bees in the lavender.

  Corwin was still feeling sorry for the chickens, and was glaring at the flint garden wall. Suddenly he leaped from the bench and started chasing them around the lawn. They shot off in different directions, clucking madly and indignantly. He ran after the leader, bent over with his overlong arms outstretched. They went twice around the garden before he caught her and, grasping her firmly between his hands, returned her to the chicken run in the far corner of the garden. The others reassembled, unsure of their next move now that the pecking order had been upset. Corwin went along the chicken wire, looking for their escape rout
e, and, finding a gap under the wire, took a stone and started hammering it back in. I went to fetch Hilda from the fuchsia. She had laid two eggs. I tucked her under my left arm and picked up the eggs. My father always said that the warmth of new eggs was the most comforting thing he could think of.

  I took the eggs as an offering to Mum, who was sulking in the kitchen, martyred by her yellow rubber gloves. The role of peacemaker usually fell to Corwin, but she was angry with Corwin of late, we didn’t know why, something to do with male children fleeing the nest, we assumed. We didn’t assume that she would miss me when I fled the nest, or that either of us would miss her. Still, for the equilibrium of the house, it didn’t do to have Mum sighing at the sink. I felt that I needed to shield Corwin and the chickens from her.

  ‘Would you like me to boil you an egg?’ I asked her.

  She looked at me over her shoulder with suspicion, her hands still in the water.

  ‘They’re fresh,’ I added. ‘Hilda just laid them.’

  Mum pulled the plug. There was a loud suck of draining water. ‘You know, Morwenna,’ she said, turning round, ‘I really hate it when you try to be nice to me!’

  I was about to say something tart when the food-timer went off, letting out an almighty wake-up trill. We both jumped. Matthew’s bread had finished proving. My mother’s face twisted and she ran out into the garden. I yelled, ‘Matthew. Bread-timer!’

  Matthew shuffled down the hall from his study. ‘Oh, thank you, Morwenna,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d put it in my pocket.’

  He took the baking tray from the boiler cupboard, tipped and removed the damp tea-cloth from the mound of dough.

  ‘Your mother seems to be crying in the garden,’ he said. ‘Do you think someone should do something about it?’

  ‘No, it’s all right. Just leave her for a bit. It’ll stop.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘All right, then.’

  It was hard on Matthew. Neither his mother, his three sisters, nor his wife had ever cried about anything, as far as he had been able to tell. He slashed a couple of lines on the surface of the dough before putting it into the oven. Then, setting his food-timer as he went and putting it into the pocket of his trousers, he disappeared back down the hall and behind the door of his study.

  I was sliding both eggs into a pan of simmering water when Oliver appeared in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘We’re going climbing,’ he said, pulling his long hair into a ponytail and tying it with the hairband from around his wrist. ‘Can I have an egg?’

  Oliver always seemed to be there – in our kitchen – adoring Corwin from afar, which was vexing. Even so, I loved to look at him, his gentle colouring, the way that he was soft hazelnut brown all over, his hair, his eyes, his skin, his freckles. And I was fascinated by the way that he looked like a plain diffident girl from one angle, and how, in profile, his strong nose and Adam’s apple transformed him into a boy. There was something otherworldly about this shape-shifting, as though he had the power to vanish, but was too modest to do so.

  I cut up some buttered toast and we dipped soldiers into our egg yolks, meditatively. Corwin came in with an armful of ropes, karabiners and harnesses, and I permitted myself a moment of jealousy – it was the one thing we couldn’t share. Corwin did his best to teach me to climb, but I had – have still – a terror of heights.

  Before I left for work I went to make my peace with Mum. I found her in the kitchen garden, still wearing the washing-up gloves, resentfully pulling up carrots. She ignored me for a couple of minutes, so I said, ‘Mum, let’s be friends.’

  She stood up and pulled off the gloves, then swept her right arm around to indicate the garden, palm up, in a movement I recognized from the ballet lessons I had dropped – to Mum’s disappointment. She had enjoyed ballet lessons. She had possessed grace.

  The kitchen garden was beautiful, monastically calm, divided into medieval squares. This was what my father’s soul would look like in image: neatly laid out, not a weed in sight, rot and canker at bay, a billowy herbal-medicinal softness around the edges and packed with nutritious goodness. For a moment I saw my mother as she saw herself, banished to the cloister, and I felt a twinge of sympathy. She had been pretty and plucky and working as a secretary and had bought her clothes on Carnaby Street until she went on that fateful camping holiday with her best friend. She didn’t even like camping. And then my father had lured her in with his strong, silent, country-squire act, and before she knew it she was pretending to enjoy long walks in the rain and to share his principles.

  ‘Do you know why your father married me?’ Mum demanded, moving her feet into third position. She liked to punish me with sudden hysterical confidences. ‘It was for your grandmother. They all knew she had cancer. No one told me, of course. That’s why he married me. I was a death present.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said helplessly. My father never spoke on the subject, which, of course, made her sound shrill and irrational even to her own ears. He seemed ennobled by his silence.

  ‘How would you know?’ she snapped.

  And now, I thought, you will cry. And she did. But she didn’t abandon herself to her tears: instead they rolled silently down her cheeks, and her lips pressed together against the strain of her distress. I picked up the bowl of carrots from the ground by her feet and took them to the kitchen. Oliver and Corwin were still there, waiting for Mickey to pick them up in the VW van. Corwin was laughing scornfully at the newspaper, which meant that he was reading about some disaster in some abandoned part of the world in which thousands of people had died horrible, entirely avoidable deaths because of Western Greed.

  ‘Your turn,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Mum.’

  He put down the newspaper. ‘Where is she, then?’

  ‘Pulling carrots.’

  He topped up his mug of tea, and poured out another to take to Mum. ‘Anything in particular?’ he asked, as he added the milk.

  ‘Dad never loved her.’

  ‘Poor Mum,’ said Corwin.

  ‘Poor Dad!’ I said.

  3.

  That morning the heat had sparked a rush on Slush Puppies at the Sea View Café and we ran out of electric blue, which upset people. ‘It’s all the same shit,’ I told my customers. ‘They’re not flavours, they’re just different combinations of chemicals. The virulent green tastes almost exactly the same and is just as bad for you.’

  My boss took me aside and said, ‘Morwenna, you are a bad-tempered, foul-mouthed little smartarse and the only reason I’m not firing you is that it’s the end of the season anyway.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said to my customers, chastened. ‘But we’re out of raspberry.’

  The preference for blue began to obsess me. It bore no resemblance to anything found naturally in food. I spent the day imagining us all with fluorescent blue intestines, glowing away invisibly. The beach was packed. Dozens of children ran in and out of the sea. Some of them played together, but many of them, I noticed, had marked out their own private circuit. I remembered doing that: pretending to be the only one on the beach. I served ice cream, asking, ‘Large or small? Soft or scooped?’ and stabbed at Mr Whippys with chocolate Flakes. One badly sunburned man told me to ‘Smile, love! It may never happen!’ And I balanced his ice cream on the cone in such a way that it would fall off before he got back to the beach – a technique I had perfected over the summer.

  At four thirty, Oliver came by to pick me up from work. ‘Where’s Corwin?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s gone back with Mickey. He’ll catch up with us later.’

  I was resentful to be an errand of Oliver’s, but we grabbed a couple of pasties and went to sit on the sea wall. I told him about the Slush Puppies.

  ‘Everyone knows it’s not natural,’ he said, ‘so they go for the most appealing colour.’

  ‘What’s your favourite Slush Puppy flavour-colour?’ I aske
d him.

  ‘Blue. What’s yours?’

  ‘Blue.’

  The tide was very flat, just lapping gently onto the sand, no foam on the edge of the water.

  ‘But why do they call it raspberry?’ I asked. ‘Why not something bluish, like blueberry or plum or something?’

  Oliver ignored me and wrapped his half-eaten vegetarian pasty in the greasy white paper bag and lobbed it into a litter bin, alarming a couple of young seagulls which had perched there. They had not yet mastered the use of their wings and flapped clumsily to the pavement, bouncing once or twice upon impact. Oliver sighed and leaned forward to prop his head in his hand. I assumed that it was Love of one sort or another.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked dutifully.

  ‘Don’t you feel sad?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About leaving.’

  Stripy windbreaks and ice-cream wrappers littered the sand. I looked out over the rainbow of plastic buckets and spades, the inflatable dolphins, the massed beer guts and blistered breasts, and wondered if I should be feeling sad.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why? Do you?’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to go to university. I’m thinking of deferring while I make up my mind.’

  I was horrified. For the last two years I had been dreaming of nothing but the filthy city where I would know no one and no one would know me. I was going to wear anonymity like a well-cut trench-coat and conduct life in angular urban grey tones.

  ‘You can’t be serious!’

  ‘Why not?’ His heels kicked gently against the wall. ‘I’m just not clear why we’re all in such a huge hurry to leave.’

  We both stared hard at the sea. A woman in a white bikini fell from a windsurfer with a loud scream and a smack of pea-green sail on the water. The windsurfing instructors kept a count of breasts exposed in the undignified struggle to get back on the board, and later bragged their tally in the pub. The woman shrieked with embarrassment as she hooked a leg over the board and tried to pull herself back on. The instructor gave her a shove, one hand on her left buttock. He would get extra points for that – they counted hands on buttocks too. She sprawled face down on the board. I was furious with her for making a fool of the entire sex. She should have been made to wear a wetsuit. This was the kind of thing I thought about. Oliver, on the other hand, was busy honing his nostalgia, looking further out to sea, where the light popped on the horizon, and thinking how beautiful it was.