At home Corwin asked, ‘Well, did it work?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’
‘Well, there you go,’ he said. ‘Don’t say I didn’t tell you.’
But perhaps, after all, the box performed some act of release, because that evening Matthew called a family summit and we set a date for a memorial service. The conventions soothed us, and we were kinder to each other. We agreed to ask Mark Luscombe to deliver the eulogy, mainly because, as local GP and chairman of the Thornton Players, he could be trusted to be heard in the back seats. We booked caterers, and informed people of the date, and chatted with the vicar, and chose passages from the Bible that sounded secular enough for our tastes, and generally behaved as if there were a body to bury or burn and take our leave of.
We dressed in black. I put on each item carefully – black tights, black blouse, black velvet skirt, black shoes. It was fitting and calming, and when I looked at myself in the mirror I saw someone in mourning and felt relief. At the church porch we greeted people in the honeyed autumn sun. The air smelt sweet, of leaves on the ground.
Inside the church, we sat in the front pew. ‘Lost at sea,’ whispered the church walls. ‘Lost at sea.’ The church was full. I had never noticed that any of these people knew my father. They cried at the moving bits. Mark talked about my father’s love of music and nature, his gentle smile. Then he said, ‘John always made me think of Sir Galahad. He was uncorrupted by the vices of our age. He was chivalrous. He was pure of heart. And he was on a quest – for his personal Holy Grail, his perfect fifteen acres.’
This raised an affectionate melancholy laugh, but it was unfortunate. The closest my father and Matthew had ever come to a row was two years earlier, when Matthew insisted on selling off the remaining acres of what had once been Thornton Farm to the farmer who leased them from him, and who promptly acquired planning permission to build a caravan site. My father had always harboured ideas that he would farm them himself one day. It was not a realistic dream. Mum never believed that he could make it work. In the dry-eyed front pew, I took Matthew’s hand and squeezed it. But at the same time I caught a glimpse of something dark and formless, the beginning of a thought that I could not yet complete.
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.
7.
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.
‘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 ba
ck 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!’
The House at the Edge of the World Page 6