‘So, what will you do?’
He blushed. ‘I’m not sure I want to go to university at all. It’s just more endless chatter. Crow is the only one with the courage of his convictions. He’s going to India to actually do something. The rest of us – we’re not doing anything. I want to do something practical – farming maybe, but sustainable farming.’
‘You are joking!’
‘You’re such a snob, Morwenna!’
‘It has nothing to do with snobbery,’ I said. He moved his head and shifted from female to male. His androgyny seemed to preclude a practical career. ‘I just think of you as …’
‘As what?’
‘I don’t know. I just can’t see it.’
The beach was emptying of families and beginning to fill with damp dogs chasing slimy tennis balls on the wet, rippled sand. The sea was edging out of the rock pools. Old Arthur came down the hill in his blue flannel dressing-gown for his five o’clock swim. We watched him walk out into the shallow red tide, stringy muscles under slack, mottled skin, the white down of his hair lifting in the breeze. He waded right out until he reached a depth at which he could begin his slow, lopsided crawl along the length of the bay. Eventually, Oliver said, ‘Well, I don’t think I can just stand by while we rape the planet. But it’s obviously not something I can talk to you about. And, anyway, we should get going.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I was. I contemplated life without Oliver in it, and came to the conclusion that I was sad about it. ‘I will miss you when I go,’ I said.
Oliver smiled sadly, put his arms around me and hugged me. ‘And I’ll miss you too,’ he said.
We both knew that he didn’t really mean me, but Corwin. I didn’t mind. It was almost the same thing.
Oliver and I made our way up into town and let ourselves in at Willow’s house. A number of small children, some of whom might or might not have been Willow’s half-siblings, scattered up the stairs. The sound of Joni Mitchell drew us into the garden, where Willow’s mother reclined on a picnic blanket, surrounded by a number of her sometime lovers, the last of her beauty evaporating mistily from her. None of them reacted to our arrival. The household was so fluid that we might well be living there, for all they knew.
‘Is Willow around?’ I asked.
‘Oh, hello, Morwenna,’ said her mother. ‘I think so. I think she’s in the greenhouse.’
One of the lovers waved a joint in our direction, which we declined. I wished I were the kind of person who knew how to accept casually offered drugs. I wished, in fact, to be Willow, who was blissfully unencumbered by a conventional family structure, and whose father might or might not have been a Beatle, her mother having been a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi groupie at about the right time. Willow occupied a wonderland of uncertainty in which everything was possible.
We went up to the end of the narrow scruffy garden and found Willow in the greenhouse, spraying the cannabis crop. ‘At last!’ she said, when she saw us. We were not late, but she had little sense of time. ‘Get me out of here!’
Saturdays were always like this. We gathered ourselves up, pub by pub, half cider by half cider. We drank the cider because it was cheap. We found Mickey playing pool in the First and Last, but Corwin had said he was going to the Beacon. Corwin was not at the Beacon but there we found a crowd of school-mates so we stopped there for a while. In the meantime we had lost Oliver at the Ship, but found him again later at the Mason’s Arms where Corwin was reported to have been seen drinking outside the George. By around nine thirty we were all united down at the harbour at the Lighter and that was where I last saw my father.
I had forgotten that he would be playing there, partly because Mum, who ordinarily enjoyed a night out, was smarting in front of the television at home. If I had remembered, I would probably have avoided the Lighter. He was sitting in a corner of the lounge with four or five of his friends, playing his fiddle. Bob Marsden was sitting next to him, holding his ear, and singing in a quavering voice, some ancient song that is certain, either directly or indirectly, to have been about the Green Wood.
Bob Marsden, in the role of ‘Dad’s best friend’, required explanation, but Corwin and I had never been able to find one for him. Since my father’s fortieth birthday party when Bob ‘forgot himself’ (my father’s words at the time) and placed his hands on my budding breasts, Corwin and I referred to him as ‘Fuck Off Bob’ (my words at the time), which enraged Mum and saddened my father. There was a permanent whiff of the locker room about Bob Marsden, a sticky stench of lewd boasts exchanged and female parts appraised and compared. We assumed that he enjoyed spending time with my father because it allowed him to talk about himself uninterrupted, but whenever we challenged my father as to what he gained from the friendship he would just say, ‘We’ve known each other a very long time.’
My father saw me at the bar and smiled. He had three pints lined up in front of him, paid for by appreciative members of his audience, and I could tell that he was still upset, from the speed at which he was drinking them. My father was a good musician, but his elegies didn’t chime with our idea of Britain, which, from our remote white corner, appeared to be populated with Real People, who fought to keep the mines open and suffered class prejudice and racism and sang angrily in industrial accents of life in the suburbs of the big cities. Some of us had even been to a big city and met Real People, some of whom had even been black.
If Fuck Off Bob hadn’t been there, I might have gone over and asked my father to stand me a pint. But instead I just waved and, suddenly irritated by his sprigs of thyme and fair maidens at gates, I thought: Mum’s right. You live in the past. (Afterwards, that thought took on the force of something spoken aloud, and I lived with the sensation of having wounded my father with my last words to him, when, in fact, I had simply thanked him for tea.) And then there was a plan and we turned to leave, Corwin hooking his arm around my neck. We waved at our father, and he, mid-fiddle, nodded, with a sad smile, which might simply have been in response to the passage of music he was playing. My father was a still man. He moved in the same way that he talked: only the necessary minimum. But when he played music he danced, which always made him appear as though under enchantment, and that was my last sight of him as we left the pub: my father seated and swaying, rapt in movement.
Corwin took the lead. We made our way back into town, stopping at the off-licence for a couple of bottles of Strongbow, and at Mickey’s bedsit for a bag of Willow’s home-grown, and we ambled the length of the seafront and up onto the cliff path. The dark was beginning to settle in the hollows of the sand-dunes and on the surface of the sea but the sky was still blue. Three angry weals of red had been scratched into it by the sun. By the time we had climbed to the cliff-top they had faded away. We walked in single file along the cliff, and each of us must have glanced down into the blackening bowl beneath Brock Tor as we began to descend to Thornton Mouth, where night had already wrapped itself around the cabin and was creeping out from the cliffs to meet the water.
That night we built a fire within a ring of white- and grey-scribbled boulders, just above the high-tide mark. Once I had imagined that an ancient language was expressed on the stones that one day I would learn to decipher. We dragged long pieces of sea-bleached driftwood across the shingle and set them on end, carefully weaving them into a cone two metres tall. We stood back and found our work beautiful, seeing there a group of dancers, arms aloft, curves white in the moon, momentarily entwined, on the point of springing apart.
Then Mickey set it alight. The fire amazed us with the speed at which it caught, twisting itself around the wooden limbs, shooting flames twice their height into the sky. I look at eighteen-year-olds now, their unformed faces, their smooth pebbles of certainty clutched tight in their fists, and I remember our faces in the firelight, how, for once, the Atlantic was outdone and the fire entered our senses with the force of an autumn storm and held us in an ecstasy of awe at its destructive power as, one by one, the branches of driftw
ood submitted, staggered inwards, collapsed glowing into the centre.
When the fire was subdued we swam on the high water. For the last seven years our little group had clung together on our raft of cleverness, navigating a school in which book-reading was considered posh, and to be posh was a congenital and incurable affliction. We were, I think, the whole world to each other. And yet, that night, as we floated in the moonlight, shivering on the eerily tame tide as we counted satellites, the ties between us were lifting. Strand by silken strand, they rose softly from the water.
We warmed ourselves by the fire. Mickey rolled a joint. I remember the tip of his tongue as he patchworked the Rizlas together, the way that he passed the joint to Willow. Oliver was pressing his hair dry with a towel. He let the joint pass him by. He disliked drugs and alcohol: they unleashed words that could not be retracted, and he was usually the first to leave. But tonight was special: it was almost all over and he was making allowances.
I lay with my head in Corwin’s lap. He was preaching. It would be our burden and our duty, he said, our generation, spawn of Thatcher. We must look to the south and see the damage we wrought there. We must undo, reduce, redistribute. We must battle with our inflated egos, make ourselves small. For soon, he said, the south would rise up against us, and its vengeance would be just and terrible. We were making a hell of the earth, the sun would burn through our atmosphere, and lo! The waters would rise and engulf us.
‘Christ, Corwin!’ said Willow, suddenly. ‘Shut the fuck up, will you?’
‘You could start by becoming a vegetarian!’ said Oliver, quietly but severely.
‘Oh, God!’ I groaned. ‘Here it comes. “How meat is destroying the planet”.’
Oliver ignored me. ‘Meat production is a really inefficient and wasteful use of land,’ he lectured Corwin. ‘So even if you enjoy chewing on dead, tortured animals, you should think about the amount of land in Third World countries that is being given over to your disgusting hamburgers. Do you know how many square miles of Amazon are chopped down every year for cattle farming? Do you?’
There was a huge hole in the ozone layer and the rainforest was in flames.
A gloom was settling on the group. Willow turned to Corwin. ‘You see what you’ve started? Now he’s at it!’
‘You forgot the farting cattle,’ said Mickey. ‘All that flatulence introduces warming gases into the atmosphere.’ After a joint and more than his fair share of cider, he found himself hilarious and started to giggle.
Oliver said, ‘It’s not the farting, actually. It’s the belching.’
His earnestness was too comical – we were all laughing now.
‘I don’t know why you think it’s so funny. That’s just how they want you, you know. Stoned and amused and disengaged.’
The accusation of ‘disengagement’ hung dangerously in the air. I deflected it with a catty swipe of indiscretion. ‘Oliver wants to be a farmer!’ I announced.
Oliver flinched as everyone fell silent and looked at him. I thought he might at last do his vanishing trick but instead Corwin pushed me from his lap, leaped up and started waving his long arms around like a fairy godfather, shouting, ‘And so you should, Oliver. So you should! That’s exactly where to start. Small-scale farming. Reduce our impact on the environment.’
Oliver said quietly, ‘Exactly. It’s like I said to Morwenna. It’s a question of conviction.’
‘Morwenna doesn’t have any convictions,’ said Corwin, sadly. I thought about raising a protest, but I was tired, and I knew even then that he was right – all I had was dislike. Then he squatted behind Oliver and put his arms around him and kissed his cheek. ‘Oliver,’ he said, ‘you’ve convinced me. I’m going to be a vegetarian from now on.’
Oliver shot me a look in which agony and resentment that I had witnessed it were mixed. I felt irritated with Corwin. Really, he was quite ruthless with his demonstrations of affection. People wanted to mistake them for love.
Willow and Mickey were arguing about whether or not it was time to go home. A mile to the north-east our father fell to his death. You would have thought that we might have felt some jarring of the soul, but we didn’t.
Willow stood up. ‘We’re off.’
The light was so strong that we were able to watch Mickey and Willow cross the beach and disappear into a moonshadow at the foot of the cliff. Oliver, Corwin and I were left watching the embers. After a while, Oliver fell asleep under his jacket, his head on his arm, his face covered with his long hair. ‘Should we wake him?’ I asked.
‘No, leave him,’ said Corwin. ‘He’ll wake up when he gets cold.’
We guarded the privacy of the cabin with superstition, and never invited our friends to sleep there, so we left Oliver by the fire, crossed the cove to the cabin and took the key from its hiding place under the eaves, let ourselves in and curled up together under the great-aunts’ crocheted bedspread and fell asleep to the shingle sighing.
4.
No one noticed that my father was missing. He had not come home the night before, but it was traditional, after the annual row, for him to spend the night on Bob Marsden’s really quite comfortable modern black-leather sofa, before recovering enough speech to apologize – he was always the one to apologize, with flowers from the garden. And Mum always accepted. And then there was a truce during which my father tried to be more present and my mother went up to Barnstaple and bought new shoes.
It was another beautiful day when Corwin and I woke up. We made tea and walked out to meet the tide, then swam until we were overcome with hunger and ran back to the house and to Matthew’s bread.
Mum lay on the front lawn, sunbathing. When the phone rang, at about midday, Corwin and I lay at either end of the hammock, reading. Neither of us made a move to answer it. At last Mum, as ever incapable of leaving a phone unanswered, leaped up angrily, tying her sarong around her waist as she went. We recognized, from her acknowledgement of the caller, a note of sarcasm, which indicated that she must be speaking to Bob. And then something – not a sound, but a quality of attention – that caused us to look up and at each other. We rolled out of the hammock (I remember Corwin holding it steady so that I wouldn’t fall) and crossed the lawn. There was no hurry. It was as it is in dreams: we were not the agents of our own movement. In the hall, Mum stood, the old-fashioned Bakelite receiver to her ear, not speaking. It was dark; the flagstones were cool under my bare feet. Mum seemed to be glowing red: the henna in her hair, the tan shiny with coconut oil, the sarong over her hips. We moved closer to her. I could smell the coconut oil on her skin. I heard her say, her voice hissing like water falling onto hot coals, ‘Yes. I’m sure! You’d better get over here.’ I knew that I needed to sit down for this. Mum was glowing redder and hotter, and the smell of coconut was making me feel ill. I sat on the stairs. Corwin had his hand on Mum’s shoulder. She replaced the receiver and turned towards me. A flame-ball of fury rolled from her and engulfed me whole.
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 sha
g-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.)
The House at the Edge of the World Page 3