‘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.
8.
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 o
ut 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.’
She attempted a smile at me. ‘Hello,’ she said, and added hopefully, ‘He seems to like it there.’ Oliver had once overheard her telling his father that ‘there must be a place for him in the world’. Perhaps she prayed that it might be Wales.
Oliver had been the first to cut loose. We were a bit hurt, but there had always been something ephemeral about him. We continued to forget him and the others. It didn’t happen quickly. It was like outgrowing skin: as though we left on the coast path tissue-thin casts of ourselves that desiccated and broke up in the wind.
PART TWO
* * *
9.
We left Matthew on his own in Thornton for the first time in his life. He had tried to leave, once, at the age we were when we left, when we stepped so blithely onto the trains that took us on, on to whatever came next. Matthew had thought vaguely that he might go to university. It seemed like a natural extension of school, which he had not much minded – had enjoyed even, at times. But then came the war, which set off a ripple in the universe. It passed over the planet and even Thornton, nudged deeper into the ground by its force, could not withstand it. Whenever Matthew climbed out of the combe he sensed imbalance.
He was nineteen and, without vanity, his body pleased him. He was confident of its design: the muscle under the skin, the bones under the muscle, the heart and lungs and intestines within their perfect casing. But did he have courage? He worried at this question, because now that The Sisters had left to marry he was in a time of joyous, almost spiritual, solitude, and it was tempting not to be concerned with courage. He had experienced fear, but was that the same as lack of courage? He suspected that he might have a certain kind of courage, the kind that only the self-sufficient possess. There was less to break in him than in a sociable man, he thought. He would be prepared to risk more.
His father had been too old for the front in the last war. It was another experience missed; James’s soul was riddled with the lacunae of missed experience. Matthew’s soul, by contrast, was so full that he did not have room for it in his body. It spilled out into his sketchbooks, onto page after page of annotated drawings. He wished to propitiate his father’s disappointments, and started a portrait of him, seated before a wall of books in his study. Matthew thought that if James could see himself, he might feel more substantial.
One April night in 1941 a storm hammered at the door – a great thuggish giant of a storm, flailing in an ecstasy of violence. From his window, Matthew watched it bend the trees. There was a challenge in its diatribe, and he wondered if this was his test, because he was sure he must be tested sooner or later, so he went out to meet it.
It mocked him all the way down to Thornton Mouth, shrieking in his ears, and cuffing him now and again into the furze. At the top of the cliff steps it kicked Matthew’s legs from beneath him, and he slid down in a scrambling reversed crawl. Once on the beach, Matthew began to fight the wind in the direction of the cabin, but it was too strong, and pressed him up against the cliff face. Matthew’s head was full of the storm. The waves assumed faces – demons charged him from the sea. They scooped up handfuls of pebbles and flung them up the beach, where they ricocheted around him, off the cliff face and off the steps, with the crackle of artillery fire. Matthew closed his eyes and listened to the pebbles smashing against each other, against the cliff, imagining the vortex of battle, imagining himself in the middle of this storm in the middle of the Atlantic and he realized that the thought of battle terrified him less than did the sea. This was the test. For the integrity of his soul, he must enlist with the navy.
The military doctor was barely older than Matthew, and fresh out of medical school. He made Matthew walk up and down in his underwear. Then he made him walk up and down again. He stood behind Matthew. ‘You have the slightest scoliosis!’ he announced, delighted with himself for spotting it. ‘You have an almost imperceptible limp.’ And, tracing Matthew’s spine with his forefinger, like a reverse faith healer, he placed a crook in Matthew�
�s back. ‘Too bad!’ said the doctor, cheerfully. ‘Otherwise, you’re in perfect health.’
Matthew did not go straight home. Instead he went to sit on the bench in the churchyard, beside the lichgate. The rain had let up. Within his view was expressed an entire myth of England, one he cherished and had been prepared to defend. The hawthorn was in blossom, there were crocuses and daffodils. Water dripped onto a gravestone from the snout of a gargoyle. Sheep grazed on either side of the V of fields that framed the sea. He did not blame the doctor, who had worked hard for his knowledge and could not be expected to keep it to himself, as an older, more experienced man might have done. No. The slight, Matthew knew, was returned to him by the sea, which lay before him, smooth, slate-grey, mockingly calm. Eventually he made his way back down to the beach and the cabin and lit the stove and set a kettle on top of it, and sat on the cabin steps waiting for the water to boil. The clouded sun laid shadows on the sea. The tide was withdrawing in long hisses of tumbling shingle; the shifting stones eroded infinitesimally. The sound of the waves swirled around in the deformity in the small of his back with narcotic effect and he began to see all things in their true scale, just as he had in the delirium of seasickness. It had not been a test, after all. It had been an admonition.
The day after he acquired his limp, Matthew set out at dawn. On the way out of the house he paused where he had never paused before, at the stick stand, which contained the collected walking sticks of generations of Venton men. He tried out a few, swinging them exaggeratedly around the porch, and selected a thorn-stick – it was apt, he thought, and he liked the feel of the round nub of wood in his palm.
He had hoped for a dramatic soul-cleansing sunrise – he had read that in some languages the sun does not rise, it is born daily. However, he had to make do with a sluggish tonal adjustment from dark to pale grey. In his rucksack were bread, cheese and apples, and he carried a compass. He paused for a moment outside the heavy oak door and considered whether to walk along the coast or to head inland. Then he turned his back to the sea and began to walk directly away from it. The path took him uphill and along the brook, past the old manor house, and into the soon-to-be bluebell woods. A couple of deer, startled, jumped the stream and disappeared into the trees.
The House at the Edge of the World Page 7