The House at the Edge of the World

by Rochester, Julia

  It was such a beautiful night, so beautiful, that when they got to Brock Tor they were overcome with nostalgia and a need to urinate into the chine, for old times’ sake. So they wandered off the main path and down to the cliff edge below the tor and they both took a piss. And my father was laughing, and Bob himself was laughing so hard he almost passed out – in fact (this bit took some intellectual effort), he must have passed out. And when he came round Bob just got to his feet and stumbled home. And it wasn’t until he woke up that it seemed to him strange that one moment my father had been there, and the next he hadn’t. And then it seemed that it was all a bad dream, but when he called Mum it became less and less like a dream and more like something that had really happened – my father was laughing at the edge of the cliff and then he fell forward and was gone.

  At this moment two versions of the story were equally true in my mind. My father was dead, but also, this was a colossal fuck-up of Bob’s that we were going to have to sort out and my father lay on a ledge somewhere with a broken leg and a fearsome hangover and the coastguard would find him. Already, there was a helicopter buzzing about over Brock Tor.

  Then Matthew came in. He had been off on his morning walk. It was so natural for him to be gone at that time of day that we had forgotten about him. He already knew that the house was all wrong, that none of us was where we ought to have been. He came in and said, ‘Something has happened to John, hasn’t it?’

  Mum spoke for the first time since Bob had started crying. She said, ‘I need a drink.’ She stood up, walked past Matthew and left the room.

  Matthew said, ‘Corwin?’

  Corwin was strangely alert, his normal lassitude gone, his limbs neatly arranged. He said, very precisely: ‘Dad fell off the cliff last night.’

  The familiar face of my grandfather dropped away, the face I always saw because it was the beloved face that was always there, and I saw him as he looked to the world: old and thin-haired, his brown-splashed hands shaking slightly. He remained standing and looked down at those hands, lifting them and holding them apart.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘Brock Tor.’

  Bob was crying again. Matthew looked around for a chair, and Corwin jumped up to find him one, taking it from the writing desk in the corner and supporting Matthew’s arm as he sat. His hand remained on Matthew’s shoulder. Matthew looked from Corwin to me to Bob. I heard the clink of ice falling into a glass in the kitchen.

  At last, Matthew said, ‘Morwenna, dear. Bob seems to be in some distress. Why don’t you make him a cup of tea while Corwin tells me what has happened?’

  In the kitchen, Mum was drinking gin. I put on the kettle and fished around in the cupboard for tea. ‘Who’s that for?’ she asked.

  ‘Bob,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Mum. ‘Give the poor man a proper drink!’ And she grabbed a glass and opened the freezer door and pulled out the ice tray and pressed ice cubes out with her thumbs as if she were strangling the chickens. Then she filled the glass with gin and shoved it into my hands.

  The cold of the glass on my palms woke me up. ‘I don’t want to go back in there,’ I said.

  She opened her mouth to say something, but instead glared at me and tutted as she snatched the glass from my hand and strode off through the hall. I sat at the kitchen table. The sky was thrush-egg blue, the triangle of sea beyond the church spire a deeper velvety damson. Somewhere over the coast path the helicopter buzzed, but I could not see it.

  The doorbell rang. Corwin went to answer it. I heard him greet the policemen and lead them into the living room. Then he came to the kitchen, took my hand and led me upstairs, where we lay on his bed. I rested my head on his shoulder and he stroked my hair for a very long time. On Corwin’s bedroom wall Che Guevara gazed off into the distance in a revolutionary reverie. And suddenly I began to laugh. Corwin said, ‘Morwenna! Stop it. What the hell are you laughing at?’

  But I couldn’t stop it. Through my laughter I managed to say, ‘Che Guevara!’ And then he saw it too. And he started to laugh and we rolled over onto our stomachs and buried our faces in the pillow so that no one could hear us and we shook as we laughed into the pillow because it was the end, you see, of all our surrogate sympathies. We were going to have to experience pain for ourselves.

  On the edge of our world people searched for my father. The coastguard were sending abseilers, we had been told, down the chine ‘to have a look’, which I took to mean, ‘for bits of your father’s brain’. But that brilliant day turned out to have been the last day of summer. In the afternoon the rains came over. If there was anything to find, it had been washed away.

  After two days of rain came the sea mist. Trapped in our attic, Corwin and I watched it roll up the combe towards us and wrap itself around the house. It sat there like the suspension of time. Three days after my father’s fall, Matthew called us all together. The police wanted to speak to us. They were not hopeful of finding him alive, they said, as though this was not obvious to us. Matthew said, in pain, ‘Ah, well. We have lived so long with the sea. The tribute is long overdue.’

  Mum let out an incredulous choking ‘Christ!’ And Corwin, not meaning to, laughed – but not unkindly, and not at anyone in particular.

  Matthew placed his hand over Mum’s and said, ‘Valerie dear, it’s time to call off the search.’

  Her hands flew to her head, but he insisted. ‘The sea has had him now,’ he said. ‘Believe me, dear. We don’t want what’s left over when she’s done with him.’

  I thought of my father in the sea’s embrace. He once told me that mermaids mate with drowning men and that he remembered seeing a mermaid from the cabin steps. He knew that they didn’t exist, he said, and that she could not have been real. But still, he said, the memory was clear. She was very dark, and not at all pretty: ‘Sly, she was,’ he said. She scowled at him and slid into the water. There she is, on Matthew’s map, sitting on a rock, her tail in the water. She is the colour of granite, of mackerel.

  When Matthew said that we owed the sea tribute, in the moment between Mum’s choke of despair and Corwin’s laugh, I thought: She was jealous. The sea was jealous of our moment of inattention, our one act of fire worship, and she took my father in retribution.

  But, of course, I had to remind myself, it would probably not have been the water that killed my father. It would have been the rock.

  5.

  The house was besieged by well-wishers. There are few cruelties to compare with the solicitude of concerned neighbours. We hid in the house, not daring to go out. Offerings began to appear on our doorstep: chicken pies and apple crumbles and Lancashire hot pots, labelled with freezing instructions, as unwanted as the little corpses left there over the years by our semi-feral cats – mice, voles, the odd disgusting rat, birds (always to my father’s distress) and, once (to mine), a rabbit kit.

  Some of the bolder and more curious simply opened the front door and strode into our house to tend us. May Rowsell, whose purple rinse cunningly disguised her steely meddlesomeness, took to dropping by, coming in without knocking and chirruping, ‘Just checking to see how you are, dears!’ When she talked to Mum her voice took on the same Edwardian music-hall contortions that she applied to her appearances in those village entertainments, which were never over before she had minced across the stage in a hat and embroidered shawl, swinging a birdcage and squeaking out ‘My Old Man’. Corwin and I thought about rescuing Mum from her, but didn’t feel up to it.

  We didn’t dare lock the front door, as though conscious that this would cause offence. Our bereavement placed upon us the duty to receive sympathy. Matthew hid in his study, Corwin and I in our rooms. On the rare occasions when I ventured downstairs I encountered yet another familiar face doing ‘something useful’, like dusting, or mowing the lawn, or carrying a tea tray in the direction of my not-quite-widowed mother.

  Finally, as if summoned by incantation, Mum’s sister, Jane, materialized out of the mist. S
he appeared in the hallway one day, just as May Rowsell was busying around collecting up untouched mugs of cold tea. May and Jane appraised each other and immediately Jane had May’s measure and May disappeared on the spot, leaving behind only the faintest puff of Devon violets-scented talcum powder and a tray of mugs abandoned on the table next to the telephone.

  Jane was even angrier than Mum, if that was possible. This was what came of descending to the country. She stood in the hallway and projected her voice: ‘Hell-O in there! It’s safe to come out now!’ Corwin and I jerked to attention, as though someone had pulled on our strings. We went downstairs, where Jane glinted, petite and neat, in a shiny mackintosh and patent leather kitten heels.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked.

  Corwin jumped the last two stairs and attempted to wrest the advantage from Jane by pretending that we had asked her to come. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ he said, kissing her cheek. ‘Mum is going to be so relieved to see you!’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Let me take your coat.’

  Mum had not wept a single tear since the day of my father’s fall. But the heat had gone out of her, and she was now sheathed in a cool, crisp shell, which restricted her movements. Jane assessed her, and said, ‘You look terrible! I’m running you a bath.’ Mum didn’t argue. Soon the scents of lavender and rose wafted down the stairs from the bathroom – aromatherapeutic weapons in Jane’s constant battle against the twin evils of ageing and dowdiness.

  Corwin and I were left alone in the living room for the first time since Before. The room felt all wrong – counterfeit. It was missing an essential but intangible element that made it our family room; my father’s part of its spirit, I presumed. I felt quite detached thinking this thought. The spirit of a house is organic – it seems a little lopsided after pruning, but it soon grows in.

  ‘She’ll be able to replace the sofa now.’

  ‘Lay off, Morwenna!’ said Corwin.

  I sat on the sofa. It truly was lumpy and scratchy and uncomfortable. I was determined to love it.

  When Mum and Jane re-emerged, Mum had a damp, propped-up look about her – like a rag doll that has been dropped in a puddle, put through the washing-machine and leaned against the radiator. Jane had blow-dried Mum’s hair and made her put on the shift dress that she had bought for my father’s Christmas work do.

  Jane ordered a light supper from me and aperitifs from Corwin. I put on some boots and went to garner salad. The mist still hung over the garden, which drooped and dripped. It was in mourning. There were weeds among the root vegetables, the courgettes had swelled to marrows, and a number of overripe tomatoes had fallen from the vines and lay rotting on the soil. I pulled at the weeds in a half-hearted attempt at rescue, but it was no good. The garden was doomed. As I snipped at the salad leaves I thought: She will dig up the vegetables. She will get rid of the chickens. She will replace the sofa. And then I realized. Mum could do none of those things because she could never, now, win the argument. The deep unfairness of this struck home. No wonder she was so angry.

  There was no bread. Matthew had not been seen for the last two days, although I had heard him moving around the house in the early hours of the morning. I could hear him thinking in the pauses in his shuffle. I went and pressed my ear to the door of his study. I feared hearing the sounds of grief, but there were none, so I knocked tentatively at the door.

  ‘Come in!’

  I opened the door to the mingled smells of oil paint, white spirit, linseed oil and pipe tobacco. He stood on a set of library steps in front of the map, his paintbrush poised beneath the magnifying-glass.

  ‘Ah! Morwenna!’ he said. ‘Have you been sent to extricate me?’

  ‘Jane’s here.’

  ‘Yes. I can sense her presence!’

  He carried on painting.

  ‘I’ve just come across something very interesting,’ he said. ‘A blasphemous pamphleteer! He seems also to have had a line in daubing slogans on walls. I found him in that funny little tract there – no, not that one. The one on the left.’

  I picked up a dog-eared tract published by the Village Sermon Society for the Publication of Village Sermons.

  ‘He’s referred to as “the infamous blasphemer of Barnstaple”. So then I went looking for him elsewhere, and it occurred to me that I might find him in the memoirs of that old magistrate, Ezra Hargreaves – you remember, he had one of those beards that you hate so much, where the upper lip and chin are shaved. Unfortunately,’ said Matthew, ‘we don’t have the wording of the blasphemies – they were too toxic to record.’

  Matthew’s sketchbook lay open on the table, the one I had made him for Christmas: hand-stitched, bound in a soft brown leather so that it could easily slide into his jacket pocket, numbered on the spine. It lay open at the page where three cartoons of the unfortunate blasphemer were sketched: a forlorn Hogarthian figure with the mad gleam of the proselyte in his eye – a working man, rumpled and resentful.

  I had stopped seeing the map. When we were younger Matthew used to hand us the magnifying-glass and say, ‘Look, children. Tell me what you can find.’ That was the game: discover something new on the map and be rewarded with a story.

  Now Matthew said, ‘What do you think was the very first thing I painted on the map?’

  ‘The house?’ I ventured. I had always assumed that he had started with Thornton, but Matthew said, ‘No. Of course, everyone tends to make that assumption. But I started here, Morwenna. With the Devil. It is Thornton’s founding myth, as you know.’

  On the map, the Devil peered back over his shoulder, pointing the apple-red cheeks of his naked backside at the church and farting. Above the steeple the gilt-haloed head of St Michael floated on a pair of wings, wearing an expression of great decorum.

  I knew Matthew’s devils. They danced all around the map. The Devil had left stories all over the county. He liked to leave his hoof-prints on our roofs: trip trap, trip trap, over the slates, softly, softly, over the thatches.

  I said, ‘Matthew, you have to come out for supper.’

  Matthew sighed. ‘That Jane,’ he said. He put down his palette. ‘She always wears such noisy shoes!’

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Morwenna!’ he said. ‘Must you be so lazy with language? And what a silly question!’

  He climbed down from his ladder. ‘You know, Morwenna,’ he said, ‘I have always been terrified of drowning.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘The Crab Man.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Matthew.

  ‘But I doubt that Dad actually drowned.’

  He looked at me sharply. ‘I’m not sure, my dear, that that thought helps.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘That Jane,’ said Matthew. ‘She has always been so purposeful.’

  Jane had insisted that we lay the table in the dining room. We never ate in the dining room, but this was not really a meal: it was a parley. Matthew sat at the head of the table, Jane and Mum on one side, Corwin and I on the other. The polished mahogany of the furniture and the red velvet curtains and brown Edwardian wallpaper all made me think of a coffin – a red-velvet-lined mahogany coffin, with brass handles. A wave of claustrophobia swept over me. My father would not like it in there. Then I remembered that there would be no coffin.

  Matthew smiled at us all. ‘Please,’ he said, to Jane, ‘tuck in.’ He held the bread basket towards her. ‘I’m sorry that there’s no bread,’ he said. ‘I’ve been neglecting my duties.’ She took from it a piece of damp Ryvita. Corwin cut himself a huge chunk of the cheese that we had found lurking at the back of the fridge and from which we had removed the mould. I understood that we were hungry, and that this salad in front of us, bursting with tomatoes and radishes and spring onions and boiled eggs, was somehow miraculous – blessed even. Suddenly I had an appetite for the commiseration food in the freezer. I was going to eat it all. Matthew said, ‘I’m sure we must have a bottle of wine somewhere. Corwin, would you fin
d some wine to offer our guest?’

  Corwin, whose charm had been slipping a little, revived and jumped up from the table. He was reminded that there was no weapon in Jane’s arsenal as powerful as Matthew’s amiability, and this cheered him enormously. Matthew turned to me. ‘Morwenna, dear. Glasses.’ I took from the sideboard the crystal glasses that had last been used for Christmas dinner. Jane pushed the salad around on her plate. She had nibbled a tiny cardboard corner of Ryvita and abandoned it. Mum ate nothing. She sat and glared with a furious despair at Matthew, who was eating heartily, as though she were about to hurl herself upon his sword.

  Corwin came back with wine and poured a glass for everyone, even Jane, who attempted to demur. She was about to say something, but Matthew lifted a glass and said, ‘I think, don’t you, that now that we are gathered, we should say a few words about John?’

  Corwin and I stopped eating. Jane sat back in her chair and murmured embarrassed assent. Mum’s expression, fixed on Matthew, remained combative. Under the table, Corwin took my hand. Matthew said, ‘We can’t pretend to share our grief. Each of us is alone with our own sense of loss and we may not intrude upon each other’s emotions. However, we may make a simple toast: to our beloved John. May his soul find peace.’

  Corwin and I muttered, ‘Dad!’ Jane pushed her nose towards the glass with a cat-like sniff, and Mum laughed and said, ‘Christ, Matthew. You always were a pompous old arse! But here’s to John – or what’s left of him.’ Theatrically, she lifted her glass and took a good challenging swig. ‘You and John!’ she said. ‘All that tramping over the cliffs communing with the elements!’ She stopped herself. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s enough of that! What happens next?’

  ‘Well,’ said Matthew, pushing off gently on Mum’s wave of hostility. ‘In the absence of a body, we have to petition the court to issue a death certificate.’

  ‘I know all of that,’ said Mum. ‘I’m not an idiot. I was there when that infant policeman was explaining it all to us. I meant, what happens with me? Your pleasant arrangement with John was based on the assumption that you would cop it first, which you haven’t.’